Azabu University, Department of Animal Science and Biotechnology, Sagamihara, 252-5201, Japan.
Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, School of Advanced Sciences, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), Hayama, 240-0193, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2020 Apr 28;10(1):7119. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64058-5.
Recently, copying others' behaviour has attracted attention among researchers. It aids individuals in reducing uncertainty about the knowledge of the environment and helps them in acquiring an adaptive behaviour at a lower cost than by learning it by themselves. Among the copying strategies, conformity, which is the copying of behavioural decisions presented by the majority, has been well studied and reported in many animals, including humans. The previous study showed that dogs did not conform to their multiple conspecific individuals; however, dogs have evolved to increase their adaptability while living with humans, and it is plausible that dogs have selected appropriate behaviour according to the behaviour of humans. Therefore, we investigated which factors influenced the choice of dogs in a situation where they have to choose one of two numerically unbalanced human groups. The results showed that the dogs followed the human majority group under certain conditions, depending on the familiarity with the human demonstrators. These results are important in considering the significance of groups for dogs and the factors of group formation, and will also provide a clue as to how dogs have penetrated into human society.
最近，模仿他人的行为引起了研究人员的关注。它帮助个体减少对环境知识的不确定性，并帮助他们以比自己学习更低的成本获得适应性行为。在模仿策略中，从众行为是指模仿多数人提出的行为决策，这种行为已经在许多动物中得到了很好的研究和报道，包括人类。先前的研究表明，狗不会模仿它们的多个同种个体；然而，狗在与人类一起生活的过程中进化出了提高适应性的能力，因此，狗有可能根据人类的行为选择合适的行为。因此，我们调查了在必须从两个数量不平衡的人类群体中选择一个的情况下，哪些因素会影响狗的选择。结果表明，狗在某些条件下会跟随人类多数群体，这取决于它们对人类示范者的熟悉程度。这些结果对于考虑群体对狗的重要性以及群体形成的因素具有重要意义，也将为狗如何渗透到人类社会提供线索。
