Probabilistic Pups, Hapless Humans, and Monkeys in the Middle: What Gamblers could learn from Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris)

The idea of luck has been around for thousands of years in many cultures. One concept closely related to luck is that of probability — the odds of a certain outcome happening. While people may generally believe they have a good understanding of probabilities, research has shown that they often have difficulty with intuitive probability estimation. This misunderstanding stems from a common behavior in humans known as “pattern seeking behavior.” Apophenia, an extreme version of pattern seeking behavior, can have significant consequences influencing behaviors such as gambling addictions, healthcare biases, and poor financial decision-making behavior. It has been noted that some animals, such as rats, perform better than humans in tasks that require choosing options in random probabilistic sequences. Researchers hypothesize that these differences are because humans over-think the problem and try to find patterns where there are none, and non-human animals make simpler, logical connections. To test the hypothesis, we tested dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella) against humans in a task where the correct answer was randomly assigned according to a strict probability relation. Our findings show that dogs, like rats, seem to outperform humans in tasks associated with picking correct answers in randomness, while monkeys perform at a level between dogs and humans. Therefore, dogs, while probably not able to grasp advanced concepts of probability such as types of distributions (poisson, gamma, beta, exponential, etc.), may have a better intuitive understanding of probabilities than humans, and capuchin monkeys may have some affinity toward human-like pattern-seeking behavior.