Guilty or Innocent?

The Biology News Net article What really prompts the dog's 'guilty look' points to a study indicating that the attribution of guilty looks to one's pet dog is likely to have its causal source in the pet owner's tendency to read something into a dog's expression that can be completely unrelated to whether or not a dog committed an offense. Alexandra Horowitz, an Assistant Professor from Barnard College, investigated the matter. Results of the study were published in Elsevier's Behavioural Processes.

This sentence from the linked article seems to sum things up. "Thus the dog's guilty look is a response to the owner's behavior, and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds." Indeed. It looks like a case of a dog reacting but not to what the human owner thinks it is reacting to. Making analogies between human and animal behavior can lead to this type of error.