Dogs’ behaviour is more similar to that of children than to that of cats in a prosocial problem situation

Investigating prosociality within a comparative framework is crucial for understanding the evolutionary origins and emergence of prosocial behaviours, often considered uniquely human. We compared 16-24-month-old children and two distantly related domesticated species, untrained companion dogs and cats—both living in the human niche among relatively similar conditions but characterised by different ecological, evolutionary, and developmental backgrounds. We assessed subjects’ spontaneous behaviour in a natural helping situation, where a familiar human caregiver (parent/owner) searched for an object hidden by the experimenter in the subject’s presence without requesting help. We measured orientation and object-related behaviours, distinguishing those explainable by stimulus enhancement (approaching/manipulating) from the ones most probably explainable by prosocial behaviours (showing/fetching). To control for motivation, we added a trial where subjects’ favourite treat/toy was hidden.

All three species showed similar levels of attention towards the caregiver/object. In line with our hypotheses, children and dogs displayed similar levels of object-related behaviour in the test trials, including those explainable also by stimulus enhancement and those likely indicative of prosociality. In contrast, cats only displayed showing (gaze alternation), and even this occurred with a significantly lower probability. Importantly, in the motivational trial, no species differences were observed in any variable, indicating that cats could also be involved in the problem situation if it was their own interest. Our findings suggest that domestication and close social contact with humans do not, by themselves, induce a tendency towards spontaneous, human-like prosociality. The similar results in dogs and children can be explained by dogs’ social/cooperative nature inherited from their ancestor and the specific selection effects that occurred during their domestication. These factors may have contributed to dogs’ exceptional cooperativity with humans, even favouring the development of spontaneous interspecific prosocial tendencies.