What if dogs were able to act in the same manner as humans? The article “Human-like social skills in dogs?” by Hare and Tomasello talks through the facts of domestic dogs being unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behavior--even enough to exceed over our nearest primate relatives (Hare and Tomasello 339). In this article, three well-known explanations were conducted and compared. One of these explanations will come to show the true reason as to why domestic dogs are so unusually skilled. First, as described by Hare and Tomasello, experimenters had set up a situation where a human hid food in one of numerous locations, and then they gave a cue to indicate where it was; although, they would use a control procedure to guarantee that the objects would not be found without the dog using the cue provided. Over all of the studies, the results had shown that dogs were still able to use other various behaviors throughout the experiment, which was above the expected rankings.
In addition, Hare and Tomasello stated that dogs are not just good cue readers because they will only use the human head and eye direction cue to locate the hidden object if the person is gazing directly at one of the two possible locations; however, they will disregard a human’s gaze if the person stares into space above the right hiding
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The recent comparative work suggests that human-like social intelligence could initially have evolved, not as an adaptation, but as a by-product of selection on seemingly unrelated social-emotional systems (Hare and Tomasello 442). Because emotions occur within the same frame as social interactions, the intelligence was a consequence of the social-emotional system in which the system gave a spark to more cognitive evolution in