Animals Feel What’s Right and Wrong, Too
Amy’s job is pretty repetitive, but normally she doesn’t mind doing what she’s asked. Today, however, she’s working alongside Sidney. Amy can’t help noticing that Sidney is receiving a small reward every time he completes a task, while she gets nothing. After a few rounds of this treatment, Amy has had enough. She refuses to go on performing her tasks, disengaging completely.
Amy’s behavior probably makes a certain kind of sense to you. Here’s what I expect you’re thinking: Amy must feel like she’s being treated unfairly (and rightly so, you might think). It is this perception about the ethics of the situation—her sense of not being treated fairly—that motivates Amy’s refusal to go on working.
But there are a couple of important details about Amy and Sidney that you should know. The first is that they aren’t workers in any conventional sense, but participants in an experiment. The experiment in question, which is taking place at the University of Vienna, is part of an effort to understand the motivations that underlie cooperative behavior. The second important detail is that Amy and Sidney aren’t human beings, but border collies. A team of animal psychologists, led by Friederike Range, are closely observing them to determine whether domestic dogs show an aversion to disparities in reward. The behavior of Amy and the other dogs in the experiment suggests that they do.1 Dogs notice when they aren’t getting the same rewards as their peers, and once they’ve figured this out, they refuse to go on performing tricks on demand.
