Doggie justice

Scientists have demonstrated that dogs can feel envy. So says The New York Times and so says National Geographic.

But scientists have not, in fact, done any such thing. What they actually seem to have demonstrated about dogs is far more interesting. The experiment in question actually had little to do with the deadly sin of envy and quite a bit to do with the cardinal virtue of justice.

Here is the Times’ description of the experiment in question:

The study tried to quantify the behavior by using well-trained dogs that readily offer a paw on command. The researchers used two dogs side by side but treated them differently, giving one a better reward (sausage) and the other a lesser one (bread) when the paw was given, or giving one dog no reward at all.

They found that the quality of the reward made little difference. But in the case in which one dog got no treat at all, that dog became less and less inclined to obey the command.

So it seems that if two dogs are asked to perform a task in exchange for a treat, but the researchers fail to hold up their side of this bargain with one of the dogs, then that dog — let’s call it the underdog — will gradually stop holding up its side of the deal as well.

The researchers might have conducted a parallel study while carrying out this research. They could have hired two graduate assistants, telling each of them that they would be paid $100 at the end of each day’s research. And then, at the end of each day, they could have paid the first assistant, but not the second — not the underdog. My theory is that the underdog would quickly become “less and less inclined” to continue showing up for work.

In the case of these hypothetical assistants, of course, no one would mischaracterize the unpaid underdog’s response as “envious.” She might be angry, but she’d be refusing to cooperate not because she’s jealous of the other assistant, but because she is the victim of an injustice — because the situation is clearly unfair. Her response is not motivated by envy but by a sense of justice.

The Times and National Geographic reports on the actual study do not allow for the possibility that a similar motive is at work in the dog’s response. They don’t seem to recognize the significant and crucial distinction between “angry at unfair treatment” and “envious.” National Geographic stumbles toward a clarification, conceding that “this kind of envy” is “really an aversion to unequal reward,” but then their article goes right back to using the word envy as though these two things were reliably interchangeable.

This particular confusion is, sadly, quite popular. We hear exactly this same bit of madness almost constantly from apologists for irresponsible wealth. Express any concern about inequality or about the plight of those who have less than the minimum amount they need to get by and they will say you are guilty of “the politics of envy.” Try to explain the distinction and they will, in turn, explain that they understand what you’re saying, they simply reject it. “Justice,” they will insist, is simply a polite euphemism for disguised envy. The virtue is just a mask for the vice.

It’s not surprising that they would argue such a thing. Of course they don’t believe there’s any such thing as justice in this life or any other. That’s what they’re banking on. Envy they accept as real. Justice they regard as mere superstition.

You’d never know it from the two articles linked above, but the lead scientist on this research — biologist Friederike Range, of the University of Vienna — doesn’t use the word “envy” herself. That’s not what she was looking for from these dogs and it was not what she found. Her description of the experiment in Science News is, as I said, far more interesting:

Dogs are the first animals outside primates that have passed an experimental test for an aversion to inequity. In other words, dogs have a sense of whether payment for work is fair. …

This experiment tested the dogs’ sense of payment for work, she emphasizes. It’s different from a dog’s objection to attention lavished on other dogs. Also, Range says, the experiment tests only the selfish version of fair pay. What she looked for was whether a dog objected to its own lack of compensation. A full sense of fairness as people use the word implies objecting also to unfair compensation for others.

So we’ve learned that dogs have at least a limited sense of fairness. That alone is enough to conclude that dogs are smarter than anybody you hear babbling about “the politics of envy.”