About This Project

Reputation judgments allow individuals to attribute characteristics and behaviors to others without directly interacting with them. For example, an individual could avoid trusting a known cheater without having to suffer the costs firsthand. Chimpanzees and domestic dogs can attribute reputations to humans. Our study will be the first to determine if less social domestic cats can assign reputations to friendly and aggressive experimenters based on direct interactions and indirect observations.

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What is the context of this research?

Reputation formation, also known as 'social eavesdropping', refers to the acquisition of information by observing third-party interactions. Attributing reputation allows observers to attribute consistent behavioral tendencies to others, which may allow them to predict future behavior without experiencing the cost of a negative interaction. Humans are thought to possess the most flexible reputation formation mechanism (1). However,domestic dogs also attribute reputations in the contexts of play, competition, and resource sharing, suggesting that they possess a domain-general reputation formation mechanism (1, 2). Testing less social species, such as domestic cats, will allow us for the first time to understand whether evolving to live in social groups is a prerequisite for this ability.

What is the significance of this project?

This project will expand the growing body of research on social eavesdropping in nonhuman species by examining whether sociality impacts a species’ capacity to attribute reputations via direct experiences and indirect observations. The highly social domestic dog has been found to attribute reputations to humans based on direct experience and third-party interactions, yet their less social domestic counterparts, cats, have yet to be tested. Investigations into cats’ abilities to attend to human communicative cues have revealed that they possess skills comparable to dogs, thus, extending the comparative investigation to cats’ capacity to attribute reputations to humans is a vital next step in studying the social cognition of domesticated species.

What are the goals of the project?

The first goal of this project is to determine if cats are able to form reputations based on direct experiences. Cats will watch unfamiliar humans interact aggressively or kindly through a one-way mirror. Both cats will be given a chance to interact with each human later to determine which human they prefer approaching or spending time with. If cats form reputations (prefer the person who was friendly to another cat) we will run a 'ghost control' condition to test whether cats still attribute reputations to the friendly and aggressive human strangers when they interact with an inanimate object instead of a cat. If so, we will be able to determine that cats attend to the experimenter’s actions when forming reputations, and not to information provided from the human-cat interaction itself.