Dr Juliane Bräuer (MPI Geoanthropology): Beyond WEIRD dogs -- Cultural Differences School of Psychology and Neuroscience Friday seminar series

The School of Psychology and Neuroscience seminar series presents a talk by Dr Juliane Bräuer (MPI Geoanthropology), titled “Beyond WEIRD dogs – Cultural Differences In Dog Human Interactions”, which will be hosted by Professor Josep Call in Seminar Room 1 and accessible online through MS Teams.

Abstract:
“Dogs show an extraordinaire capacity to understand, communicate, and cooperate with us. However, what we know about the social-cognitive skills of dogs comes from observations and experiments performed in WEIRD societies. Around the world though, dogs are kept for various functions, they are perceived and treated differently, suggesting cross-cultural diversity in the strength of dog-human relationships. In our project about Cultural Differences in Dog Human Interactions we take to distinctive approaches to address this issue, hypothesizing that dog-human relationships will be closer in societies where dog functions require intense cooperation between dogs and humans.
In the first study, we collected data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database and investigated how function and relationship are related. In the second study, we investigated how dogs' cognitive skills and dog-human interactions vary cross-culturally comparing dog-owner interactions in Germany and in four non-western cultures. We developed a test battery with short tests on the following aspects of dog-owner interaction: education, communication, visual perspective-taking, social referencing and physical cognition. I will present data from this ongoing study.
The results of this project do not only contribute to a better understanding of the dog-human relationship, but also of the relationship between cultural evolution and domestication, i.e. how cultural and evolutionary processes influence each other.”