Your dog knows where a piece of food is hidden. You do not. If showing you the right place means the dog gets the food, looking between you and the hiding spot makes perfect sense.
But what if you are the person who takes the food for yourself?
That question gets surprisingly close to what researchers have asked dogs in experiments. In some of those studies, dogs changed what they showed people depending on whether the person was likely to help them or compete with them. Sometimes they even directed a person toward a place where no food was hidden.
It is tempting to call that lying. The more interesting answer is a little more complicated.
What Does It Mean for a Dog to Mislead Someone?
When people lie, we usually assume something about what is happening in their minds: they know what is true, know that someone else does not, and deliberately present false information to change what that person believes.
Animal behavior researchers can observe the behavior, but not all of those private mental steps.
That is why studies often use terms such as deceptive-like behavior or tactical deception. A signal can function by sending another individual in the wrong direction without proving that the animal has a human-like concept of truth, falsehood, or lying.
This distinction matters. A dog does not need to sit down and think, “I know where the food is, but I am going to make this person believe it is somewhere else,” for its behavior to mislead someone successfully.
The scientific question is what the dog changes, who it changes it for, and what information seems to guide that choice.
When Sharing the Food Changed the Dog’s Choice
A 2017 experiment created a situation in which dogs had good reason to care about who they were dealing with.
The dogs learned about two unfamiliar people. One was cooperative: when that person found food, the dog received it. The other was competitive: that person kept the food.
The dogs then knew about three possible locations. One held food they strongly preferred, another held less-preferred food, and the third was empty. Their task was to lead one of the two people to a location.
After that, they would get another opportunity with their cooperative owner.
This created an interesting problem. Showing the competitive person where the best food was could mean losing it. Leading that person somewhere else could leave the preferred food available for later.
The dogs did not treat the two people in the same way. The exact pattern differed between test days, but by the second day they led the competitive person to the preferred food less often than expected by chance and toward the empty location more often than they did with the cooperative person.
The researchers described the behavior as deceptive-like and argued that the dogs were flexibly changing their choices according to the person they were leading.
That is much more interesting than a dog simply learning that one box usually contains food. The important difference was who was asking.
A Newer Experiment Took the Idea Further
Several years later, researchers returned to a related question from another direction.
Instead of asking dogs to physically lead someone to one of three food locations, a 2025 study examined dogs’ showing behavior: things such as looking back and forth between a person and a location, approaching the person and then moving toward a hiding place, or otherwise directing attention toward it.
First, the study tested whether dogs changed their behavior depending on what their owner already knew. Dogs showed the food location more often when the owner had not seen where it was hidden than when the owner had watched the hiding.
Then the researchers introduced another cooperative-versus-competitive situation. The cooperative person gave retrieved food to the dog. The competitive person ate it.
Again, the dogs behaved differently.
They showed the actual food location more often to the cooperative person. With the competitive person, they showed empty locations more often. Among dogs that indicated an empty location, many focused their showing on one particular empty place in a way that could genuinely send the person there.
This newer experiment is particularly useful because the dogs had learned about the cooperative and competitive people in a different setting before the test. They were not simply being rewarded repeatedly for pointing to a particular box during the task.
There is also an important wrinkle. In this experiment, sending the competitive person to an empty location did not directly earn the dog more food. The researchers discuss several possible reasons the behavior might still matter, including preventing the competitor from getting the reward.
So the result strengthens the case for flexible, misleading communication, but it does not give us a simple window into the dog’s thoughts.
Dogs Pay Attention to What We Can See
For misleading behavior to be useful, it helps to know something about the other individual—at the very least, what they are paying attention to.
Dogs are remarkably sensitive to that.
In an earlier experiment, dogs were told not to take a piece of food. They were less likely to take it when the person was watching them closely, but behaved differently when the person left the room, turned away, became distracted, or closed their eyes.
That alone does not prove a dog is thinking about another person’s mind. A dog could simply learn rules such as “food is safer to take when a human’s face is turned away.”
But newer experiments have made the problem harder.
In a 2025 study, dogs encountered two plates of forbidden food. During an earlier exploration, they had learned that a person sitting in one part of the room could see one plate but not the other.
During the actual test, the person was no longer visible. Instead, the dogs sometimes heard the sound of that person chopping carrots, which suggested she was still in the same place.
When they heard the chopping sound, 28 of 36 dogs first approached the food location that would have been hidden from the person’s view. Dogs hearing an unrelated street-noise recording showed no comparable preference.
The dogs therefore combined something they had learned earlier about the room with an auditory clue about where a person might be.
Whether they were genuinely imagining the other person’s visual perspective or following a clever learned rule remains open to debate. But either way, the behavior shows why dogs can be so good at doing things when our attention is somewhere else.
Dogs Also Keep Track of Whether We Are Reliable
The relationship runs in both directions. People can mislead dogs too.
Dogs are famously willing to follow human gestures such as pointing, even when food is involved. But that trust is not completely blind.
In one experiment, a person first pointed accurately toward hidden food. Later, the same person pointed toward an empty container after the dog had been allowed to see that it was empty. When that person returned to giving a pointing cue in another food-search trial, substantially fewer dogs followed the gesture.
When a new person replaced the unreliable one, the dogs were willing to follow the new person.
Other experiments have produced more complicated results, and dogs can sometimes continue following misleading human cues even when doing so seems unhelpful. That makes the picture more interesting rather than less: dogs do not appear to operate with a simple universal rule that says “trust humans” or “distrust liars.”
They learn about people, cues, and outcomes in context.
And that is relevant to deception. A dog that can behave differently toward a reliable helper and an unhelpful competitor already has some of the social flexibility needed for misleading behavior to work.
What About That Suspiciously Guilty Face?
There is one familiar situation that should not be added to the evidence too quickly.
You come home. Something has been chewed, stolen, or knocked over. Your dog lowers its head, avoids your gaze, or gives you what seems to be an unmistakable guilty expression.
It can look as though the dog knows exactly what it did and is trying to appear innocent.
Experiments on the so-called guilty look give us reason to be careful with that interpretation.
In one study, owners sometimes scolded their dogs even when the dogs had actually obeyed a command not to eat a treat. The behaviors owners associate with guilt appeared more strongly in response to being scolded than according to whether the dog had really eaten the forbidden food.
Other work has similarly found that owners cannot reliably determine from the dog’s greeting behavior whether the dog committed the supposed misdeed.
That does not prove dogs never experience anything resembling guilt. It means the familiar guilty-looking face is not good evidence that a dog is confessing, hiding knowledge, or pretending innocence.
Sometimes we are the ones adding the story.
Misleading Is Not the Same as Lying
The experiments leave us with an interesting middle ground.
Dogs can distinguish between people who behave differently toward them. They can alter what they show those people. They pay attention to whether humans can see them. They can use past information about a person’s location or reliability when deciding what to do next.
And under controlled conditions, dogs have produced behavior that can send a competitive person toward the wrong location.
That is enough to say that dogs can mislead people in a behavioral sense.
What it does not establish is the full mental machinery of a human lie.
We do not yet know that a dog performing these behaviors represents a person’s false belief and deliberately tries to create that belief while understanding it as false. Some apparently sophisticated behavior can emerge from learning, memory, attention to human cues, and flexible rules built through experience.
Those explanations should not be dismissed as somehow uninteresting. A dog that notices who shares, who takes, who can see, and when a signal is useful is already doing something socially impressive.
So, Can Dogs Mislead People?
Yes—there is experimental evidence that dogs can behave in ways that misdirect people and can adjust those behaviors depending on who the person is and what that person is likely to do.
Calling every such case a lie, though, goes further than the evidence allows.
The most revealing part may be neither dishonesty nor innocence. It is how carefully dogs seem to track the humans around them.
They notice who helps. They notice who competes. They notice when we are watching. And sometimes, when giving us the correct information is not in their interest, they appear perfectly capable of giving us something else instead.
Dogs may not be little human liars, but they are far from passive participants in the social games we play with them.
Sources & Further Reading
- Heberlein, M. T. E., Manser, M. B., & Turner, D. C. (2017). Deceptive-like Behaviour in Dogs (Canis familiaris). Animal Cognition, 20(3), 511–520.
- Heberlein, M. T. E., Oberliessen, L. V., Virányi, Z., Lutonsky, C., & Turner, D. C. (2025). Showing—Intentional Communication—in Dogs (Canis familiaris). Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1608797.
- Huber, L., van der Wolf, P., Menkveld, M., Riemer, S., & Völter, C. J. (2025). Canine Perspective Taking: Anticipating the Behavior of an Unseen Human. iScience, 28(2), 111811.
- Huber, L., & Lonardo, L. (2023). Canine Perspective-Taking. Animal Cognition, 26, 275–298.
- Call, J., Bräuer, J., Kaminski, J., & Tomasello, M. (2003). Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris) Are Sensitive to the Attentional State of Humans. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 117(3), 257–263.
- Takaoka, A., Maeda, T., Hori, Y., & Fujita, K. (2015). Do Dogs Follow Behavioral Cues From an Unreliable Human?. Animal Cognition, 18(2), 475–483.
- Horowitz, A. (2009). Disambiguating the “Guilty Look”: Salient Prompts to a Familiar Dog Behaviour. Behavioural Processes, 81(3), 447–452.
