Attention
For Dogs It's "Of Course I'll Obey — If You're Watching Me!"
Dogs are more likely to disobey when their owners are not paying attention.
Posted May 5, 2016

I am continually amazed by the similarities between the behavior of dogs and that of young children. I encountered another instance of the parallels between the behaviors of dogs and kids when I took my Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever puppy to a nearby park so he could have the opportunity to socialize with some children.
When I arrived at the park, a young mother was just placing her toddler son (I estimated him to be about three years of age) in the sandbox. She gave him a little plastic bucket which contained a small shovel and a little rake and told him to play for a while. She then pointed a finger at him and gave him the instruction, "Now don't get out of the sandbox until Mommy tells you that it's OK!" The woman sat down on a nearby bench and watched her child for a little while. During this time the boy sat in the sandbox raking the sand and occasionally glancing up at his mother, but showed no signs of getting up or leaving his assigned place.
A short time later another woman arrived with a young baby in a carriage. She sat down next to the toddler's mother and they struck up a conversation. At this point, in order to face the woman she was speaking to, the young boy's mom turned in such a way that her back was toward her child. The boy looked up, saw that his mother had turned away, and immediately stood up and wandered out of the sandbox in her direction. The mother turned and noticed that her child had left his place and immediately got up and carried the boy back to the sandbox. She placed him next to his toys and repeated the instruction that he shouldn't get out of the sandbox until she gave him permission. The young mother then returned to the bench and to her conversation with the other mother, once again turning her back on her child. The scenario replayed itself: When the boy saw that his mother had turned away, he once again stood up and began to wander out of the sandbox in her direction.
You're probably wondering why this incident caused me to think about canine behavior. The reason is that I attended a novice dog obedience class just the night before. The instructor was working on the long down exercise, which should train a dog to stay in the down position for several minutes while dog's owner moves across the room, perhaps some 40 feet away. However this was early in the training sequence, so the instructor had the dog owners place their dogs in the down position and then give the stay command. Each owner then stepped about four or five steps in front of their dogs and turned to face it. Each of the nine dogs in the group held their position for a minute or so without any difficulty or fidgeting. Next the instructor asked the owners to turn their backs on their dogs. In less than 10 seconds a Poodle and a Collie stood up and began to move away from the line of dogs and toward their owners. The instructor asked the owners to turn back to their dogs and reset them in the down position. Once again the owners stepped out in front of their dogs, and a few moments later the instructor again asked them to turn their backs to their pets. Only a few seconds after the owners turned around, the Poodle once again stood up and moved toward her owner.
These cases (canine and human) are very similar from a psychological point of view. Both the child and the dog were given a command and when either the parent or the dog's owner was looking at them they both obeyed. However, the moment that the individual in charge was no longer paying attention and had turned away, both canine and child chose to stop obeying.
Developmental psychologists who specialize in human behavior have studied these situations, which they call "child compliance and noncompliance." Children who disobey their parents can often cause problems in their family relationships. In some situations disobeying parental instruction can threaten a child's safety. Psychologists Rex Forehand at the University of Georgia and Mark Roberts at Idaho State University have extensively studied misbehavior in children, trying to teach parents the skills they need to manage their kids. This research shows that one situation in which kids are apt to disobey their parents is when their parents are not paying attention to them. In fact, one of the mainstays of "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy," which is designed to deal with "defiant" or "oppositional" children, involves teaching the parent to pay attention to what the child is doing and to let the child know that their caretaker is watching and interested in them. Some psychologists even suggest that one of the reasons why children disobey commands from their parents is to get some attention from their caretaker—even if the resulting attention happens to be negative.
Research seems to show that dogs operate in exactly the same way. In a study published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology*, Christine Schwab and Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna tested dogs to see whether their obedience to a command depended upon the degree of attention that their owners were paying to them.
This study looked at 16 dogs and their owners. The dogs were tested for their compliance to a simple command. Since training can ultimately get most dogs to obey commands quite reliably, the authors point out that "we selected dogs that showed an intermediate level of obedience in a preexperimental test. To fit the purpose of the experiment, they should have already learned to obey commands but must not be too strictly trained, too lazy, or too anxious in the test situation." The command that the dogs would be tested on would be the "down and stay" command.
The dogs were tested while their owners engaged in one of five different activities which varied in the amount of attention the owner was paying to their pet. The owner could sit and watch the dogs, read a book, watch TV, turn his or her back on the dog, or leave the room.
The data from this study was exactly what one might expect based on the studies of human children: When being watched by their owner, the dogs stayed lying down most reliably. The dogs were less reliable when their owners did not appear to be paying attention to them, such as when turning their back on the dog, with the least degree of obedience found when the owners left the room and were out of sight.

It's clear that dogs pay attention to whether or not their owners are paying attention to them. When dogs are being monitored and watched, they obey to the best of their ability. When dogs are not being watched it may be a case of the old proverb, "When the cat's away, the mice will play," because if the dog's owner is not attending to them the dog knows it cannot be punished or corrected.
Alternatively, the dogs may be disobeying simply because their owner is not attending to them, and disobedience is an effective way to recapture the attention of their owner.
The take-home message from all of this is that if you want your dog or your child to obey your instructions, watch them—and let them know that you are watching.
Stanley Coren is the author of many books including Gods, Ghosts and Black Dogs; The Wisdom of Dogs; Do Dogs Dream? Born to Bark; The Modern Dog; Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? The Pawprints of History; How Dogs Think; How To Speak Dog; Why We Love the Dogs We Do; What Do Dogs Know? The Intelligence of Dogs; Why Does My Dog Act That Way? Understanding Dogs for Dummies; Sleep Thieves; The Left-hander Syndrome.
Copyright SC Psychological Enterprises Ltd. May not be reprinted or reposted without permission.
* Data from: Christine Schwab and Ludwig Huber (2006). Obey or Not Obey? Dogs (Canis Familiaris) Behave Differently in Response to Attentional States of Their Owners. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120 (3), 169-175.