Cats don’t avoid strangers who misbehave with their owners, unlike dogs

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There is an old stereotype about the difference between dogs and cats. Dogs are loving and fiercely loyal, they say, while cats are indifferent and indifferent. Most people who like cats probably disagree – I certainly find it hard to believe, with my cat purring on my lap, that she doesn’t care about me.

Overall, research on cat cognition suggests that cats form emotional bonds with their humans. Cats seem to experience separation anxiety, respond more to their owners’ voices than to strangers, and seek guarantees from their owners in frightening situations.

But a new study, carried out by researchers in Japan, complicates the picture of our relationship with cats. Adapting a method previously used to study dogs, the researchers found that cats – unlike dogs – do not avoid strangers who refuse to help their owners.

In the experiment, a cat watched its owner try to open a box to get something inside. Two strangers sat on either side of the owner and the owner turned to one of them and asked for help. In attempts to “help” the stranger helped the owner to open the box. In “no help” tests, the stranger refused. The other stranger sat passively, doing nothing.

Then, the two strangers offered the cat a snack, and the scientists watched to see which cat approached first. Did she prefer to eat from a helper rather than a passive spectator? This would indicate a positivity bias, showing that the useful interaction made the cat feel more affectionate towards the stranger. Or did she avoid eating the non-helper? This negativity bias may mean that the cat became suspicious.

When this method was used to test dogs, they showed a clear negativity bias. The dogs preferred not to take food from a stranger who refused help from the owner. In contrast, the cats in the new study were completely indifferent. They showed no preference for the helpful person and no avoidance of the useless person. Apparently, when it comes to cats, food is food.

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What should we get out of it? A tempting conclusion would be that cats are selfish and don’t care less how their humans are treated. While this may fit our prejudices about cats, it is an example of anthropomorphic bias. It involves interpreting the behavior of cats as if they were small furry humans, rather than creatures with their own different ways of thinking.

To really understand cats, we have to get out of this human-centered mindset and think of them as cats. When we do, what seems most likely is not that the cats in this study were selfish, but they were unable to perceive the social interactions between humans. They were unaware that some of the strangers were being useless.

Although cats are able to pick up some human social cues – they can follow human pointers and are sensitive to human emotions – they are probably less in tune with our social relationships than dogs.

Cats have been domesticated more recently and have been altered by domestication far less than dogs. While dogs descended from socially pack animals, the ancestors of cats were lone hunters. Domestication probably increased the existing social skills of dogs, but it may not have done the same for cats, who were less socially conscious to begin with. Therefore, we should not rush to conclude that our cats do not care if people are mean to us. Most likely, they just can’t say.

Despite their popularity, we still know relatively little about how cats think. Future research may show that cats’ understanding of humans is even more limited than we currently imagine. Alternatively, cats may be better able to recognize human social dynamics in different contexts.

But, regardless of what the studies reveal, we must avoid allowing prejudices or anthropomorphism to drive our interpretation of the behavior of cats. Before we judge our feline friends as indifferent or selfish, we must first try to see the world through their eyes.

Ali Boyle, researcher in Kinds of Intelligence (Philosophy), Cambridge University

This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.