Your Dog Is Not Actually Judging You, New Study Finds

Everyone seems to have an opinion about your life choices, whether it’s your mom asking why you’re still single, your friends ragging on your music taste when you’re passed the aux, or your iPhone’s Siri updating you on your screen-time habits. But if there’s one creature who never has a critique to offer, it’s your pup. Seriously — science has now proven that the side-eye isn’t personal. A new study found that dogs don’t judge humans.

Animal behaviorists refer to the knowledge animals gain about each other based on past interactions as “reputation” (yes, this is basically just an official sounding definition for how we use the word). Third-party evaluation, aka eavesdropping, is when animals respond to a behavior they witnessed in an interaction they weren’t part of. “Given their cooperative relationship with humans, considerable interest has focused on whether dogs can socially evaluate humans, though findings remain mixed,” Hoi-Lam Jim, the new study’s lead author, wrote.

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In the new study, researchers observed 40 dogs. The pups watched two human strangers interact with another dog; one of the humans was generous with food, while the other didn’t feed the dog. The dogs then directly interacted with the humans, and researchers observed their behaviors toward the two people.

The result? Even after seeing a giving human and a selfish human interact with a different dog, dogs showed no bias toward them. They approached the generous human and the selfish one equally as often. “Results showed that dogs across all age groups did not significantly prefer the generous partner compared to the selfish partner,” Jim wrote.

Funnily enough, they found that 37 percent of the dogs showed a bias for the human standing on the right side, regardless of whether they were the generous or selfish human. “A likely explanation for this bias is that the study was conducted in an outdoor test enclosure during the summer months and the right side of the enclosure provided more shade,” Jim wrote. Comfort winning over grudges? This tracks.

Researchers concluded that the study didn’t find support that dogs form reputations for humans after eavesdropping situations — unlike your mom, who definitely overheard that thing you told your sister about why you deleted Hinge. They describe a few potential study limitations, including the small sample size and the fact that it may have been difficult for the dogs to tell the humans apart. More research is needed to make definite conclusions. But for now, it’s a nice thought that maybe these pups are just keeping their minds open and judgment-free. The jury’s still out on cats.