Do Dogs Think Like People? This Personality Test Will Tell You

Dr. Brian Hare & Pup

Dr. Brian Hare & Pup

Does your dog march to his own drummer or does he look to you for direction? Is your dog a good problem solver? Do purebreds see the world differently than mixed breeds? Is trying to be the alpha dog really effective? These questions and more prompted me to wonder, what makes my dog tick and, do dogs think like people? What I learned surprised me and I think it will surprise you, too.

There is only one science-based “test”  I’ve found for dog owners to answer these questions. It’s called Dognition and I learned about it from the amazing trainer and Animal Planet star, Victoria Stilwell. Dognition was co-founded by Dr. Brian Hare and his wife, Vanessa Woods. Dr. Hare is a scientist and an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, as well as a member of Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neurosciences.  Vanessa is a scientist, author and journalist.Together, they’ve clocked in years of research in a canine cognition laboratory and are now sharing this knowledge with us. And what’s even cooler, is each of us who completes Dognition becomes part of a massive body of thousands of citizen scientists contributing data that is helping to improve the lives of dogs everywhere.

Dognition-girl with puppySo what exactly is Dognition and how does it work?

It’s a series of science-based games you play with your dog that determine how he or she thinks in five key categories:

* Empathy – reading and responding to the emotions of others

* Communication – using information from others to learn about the environment

* Cunning – using information from others to avoid detection

* Memory – storing past experiences to make future choices

* Reasoning – inferring the solution to new problems

Once you complete and record the results, the Dognition team of experts is able to tell you what “type” of dog yours is. There are 9 personality profiles. Is your baby an Ace, a Maverick, a Charmer, a Socialite, a Protodog, a Renaissance Dog, an Expert, a Stargazer or an Einstein? I couldn’t wait to find out!

My Experience

My husband and I did the exercises with Sophie. They recommend you do these with a partner. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. The exercises are all treat-based motivation, which was just fine with our little treat-monger, but they clearly involve problem solving, bonding and memory, among other things. It takes about an hour to do, and I’d recommend not doing them all in one sitting as it could get tedious for your dog. But, when we broke it up, Sophie had fun with them and it was interesting to see how she responded. Sophie turned out to be a Renaissance Dog. When we looked at Sophie’s personality and at the test results, it made sense. She was very bonded, but also down the middle between self-reliant and collaborative. She did fit her profile and it’s helped us find some better ways to work with her on training.

What I think is so important about being a part of Dognition is the kind of huge impact it could have on everything from how we train our dogs to moving away from something like Breed Specific Legislation, which has helped to create a prejudice, often unfairly, against certain breeds like pit bulls. If we find behavior isn’t breed specific, that immediately dismisses the idea that all pit bulls, or any kind of dog, for that matter, are dangerous and bad.

The Dognition Interview

So I was really excited when Dognition co-founder, Vanessa Woods, agreed to share her insights with us in an interview. Read on to find out some fascinating facts about our dogs.

B&S: You and Brian co-wrote a great book called The Genius of Dogs about how our dogs are smarter than we think. Was that the catalyst for Dognition or did the company come about beforehand?

VW: It all happened at the same time – we gave birth to a baby, the book and the company! Brian came up with the idea for Dognition at a dog training conference. The trainers were so interested in the experiments we were doing and wanted to know how they could do them at home with their dogs. He realized that they could and the concept was born. We’ve found from the Dognition data we get back, that what people are doing from home with their dogs was mirroring the data from world-class research, so this is a real thing and people are helping to make real findings!

At the Duke Cognition Center, Brian was having about a thousand people a year come through but he also had so many people waiting; it became kind of like a Justin Bieber concert! How do you get in? Is there somebody who knows somebody? People really loved doing this and wouldn’t it be great if they didn’t have to come to the Center to do it?

B&S: Simply put, what is Dognition’s mission?

VW: Trying to figure out what strategies dogs use to navigate their world.

B&S: How do you utilize the citizen scientist concept at Dognition?

VW: One of the limitations for scientists is that a really large study for us is like 50 dogs. Brian’s area of research is not extremely well-funded. So we’d have all these interesting questions, but no way of answering them because we just don’t have the number of dogs needed for the research to mean something. When thousands of people put together the data for hundreds of breeds, then we really can find out the answers to these questions.

B&S: I read that dogs come close to babies in communication skills. Is this true and how?

VW: One of the things Brian found out early in his research was that dogs use social cues in the same way that infants start to use social cues. So when you do the communication exercise with Sophie, sometimes she would follow your pointing cues and sometimes she wouldn’t, right?

B&S: That’s right, kind of like she does on her walks.

VW: LOL. When she was following your pointing cue, that’s what human infants do. And what they’re doing is they’re reading your intentionality. A point can mean anything to any animal. But what it means to a dog and to a human infant is, you know something that, perhaps, they don’t know, and you are giving them a signal to try and help them. This ability in babies leads to all sorts of other forms of cooperation and to language; it’s a building block for many of the skills that we think of as uniquely human.

DognitionWhat do the different personality profiles mean?

B&S: Take us through the different profile categories.

VW: These categories are created on a scale from social to non-social. They’re kind of a category to describe your dog’s way of thinking. To give you a couple of examples, the Renaissance Dog, like Sophie, is good at a little bit of everything; the dogs who are more independent problem solvers, they would be the Mavericks and Stargazers, who prefer to solve problems on their own. Then, there are the more collaborative dogs like the Socialites and the Aces, and they are really paying attention to their owner’s body language and faces to see what they’re doing.

B&S: This sounds like Dognition can have huge implications on dog training. Will trainers have to work with a dog’s profile to figure out the best training techniques?

VW: Trainers have already written back saying Dognition has been helpful to them and that it gives them more information in finding out what kind of dog they’re dealing with so they can better implement their training techniques.

Purebreds & Mixed Breeds

B&S: The research talks about differences you’ve found between purebred and mixed breed dogs. What were they?

VW: We found that purebred dogs are more on the collaborative end of the scale. They’re more dependent on human social cues, which is interesting because, purebreds were originally bred to be working dogs in areas like herding and hunting. They had to pay a lot of attention to human social cues to do their jobs. With the mixed breeds, we found they were much more reliant on memory. Their memories were amazing and that’s what they were using to solve problems.

B&S: You and Brian did a pictorial blog post on the Huffington Post this year,  illustrating ways where dogs showed their smarts. One was that they selectively choose to obey what we tell them. I’m probably not just speaking for myself here, when I say that that kind of thing can drive us dog parents a bit nutty. What are our dogs thinking?

VW:  Most of the time, dogs are very collaborative and they want to do what you say. The fact is, they’re really smart and good at reading our social cues. And, like kids, they’re not above using this information against you. So, they can use when you’re paying attention or not in getting their own way, like in sneaking a muffin off the coffee table or getting into something else they shouldn’t. They can pay very close attention to where your attention is focused, or not.

Is the alpha dog really the leader?

B&S: We’ve read for years that we have to be the alpha; that dogs follow the alpha dog. Well, Dognition has turned that notion on its head. What did you find?

VW: From the research we did, the whole alpha dog idea was based on a very outdated wolf model. That being said, the model we should be using is to look at the population of dogs who live without humans, which are the feral dogs. The feral dog society is a very different one from the wolf society, and they are actually drawn to and do actually follow the dog who has the most friends, not the most dominant dog.

B&S: So being nice to our dogs pays more dividends than we thought!

B&S: I read about the dog who learned 1000 words. Can other dogs do this too?

VW: We know that one dog can. I’m not sure how many people have taken the time to teach their dog 1000 words, but yes, they can. They learn similarly, again, to human infants. The really impressive thing is, in the dogs tested, they can hear a word once or a couple of times, and they’ll remember the word a month later. It makes us wonder if dogs know exactly what we’re saying and are just selective on deciding how they’re going to behave.

B&S: Dognition has a very impressive group of people on its Experts Panel, including world-class trainers, doctors, behaviorists. I see you’ve recently added Victoria Stilwell. How does the panel work with you to help strengthen what you do?

VW: The people on the panel are incredible thought leaders in terms of our relationship with dogs and living with dogs. We can just reach out to them for input from their own vast experiences. People like Victoria can send through issues that are important to her, and this can contribute towards the growing community and the conversation that we have with people. We’re just scientists but we recognize that there’s a whole world of people out there who are improving the lives of owners and their dogs. It’s just wonderful to be able to have access to them.

Dognition Shelter Program with Petfinder

B&S: Tell us about the amazing Dognition Shelter Program with Petfinder.

VW: We’re working with Petfinder to distribute thousands of Dognition Toolkits free to shelters and foster homes they work with and those people can run Dognition with their dogs. When people go to adopt dogs, they’re saying there’s a trend where certain dogs are avoided based on their appearance, like a dog that’s not so pretty or a scary looking black dog. Dognition gives a potential adopter a story based more on how the dog thinks than what they look like. The idea is they can either take a dog that has already done Dognition, or they can do Dognition with them at home. It gives shelters more real ammunition to say there’s more to this dog; they’re really unique and special in their own way, and this is how.

pitbull and babyB&S: How can this help communities evolve away from Breed Specific Legislation and the prejudice towards certain breeds like pit bulls?

VW: We actually are asking people to sign up their pit bulls so we can do research on the breed. There’s no conclusive scientific evidence that says pit bulls are any different than other dogs. In fact, science suggests there’s more difference between individual dogs within a breed than there is from breed to breed. You can learn so much more about your dog and how they think than just judging them on their appearance. And, you can contribute to the world’s fact-based understanding of pit bulls.Dognition helps you do that.

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Dognition toolkit for one dog: $19.00 (monthly and annual memberships are also available)

Hope you enjoyed my experts interview with Vanessa Woods. You can try Dognition and find out what your dog’s personality profile is here.

Please reach out with any comments or questions about it. Tell me what you found out about your dog. Look forward to hearing from you!

Until next time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by Jody Miller-Young
What does stylish mean to you? I’m passionate about animals, fashion, travel, home decor and rescue, and that's what you'll find here. After a recent move to Fort Lauderdale from NYC, we're loving our new life in the sunshine. Welcome to my world! Grab your favorite beverage, curl up and stay awhile.