Social Referencing in Dogs

Social referencing is the use of another individual's emotional reaction as information. When the environment is uncertain, the observer checks a social partner and lets that partner's response shape approach, avoidance, or caution. In dogs, this is a documented phenomenon. Dogs do not only watch what people do. They also watch how people feel about what is happening.

That makes social referencing one of the most important bridges between social learning and emotional regulation.

What It Means

The concept originally became famous in human developmental psychology through the visual-cliff literature. An infant confronted with an ambiguous situation looks to the caregiver and uses the caregiver's expression as a guide for what the situation means.

Dogs show a comparable pattern. In the classic studies, a dog encountered an ambiguous object and then checked the owner. Positive owner responses increased approach, while negative responses promoted hesitation or avoidance. Documented

That matters because it shows that the dog is not simply reacting to the object on its own. The human response becomes part of the environment the dog is interpreting.

What the Dog Literature Shows

Merola, Prato-Previde, and Marshall-Pescini provided the classic demonstration. Dogs facing an unfamiliar and ambiguous object looked to their owners and then changed their own behavior in line with the owner's affective response. That is social referencing in the strict sense.

The puppy work makes the developmental point even stronger. Fugazza and colleagues found social-referencing effects in puppies as young as eight weeks, and the effect persisted after a delay when the puppy was later tested alone. Documented That means the emotional cue is not only affecting behavior in the instant. It is altering how the situation is encoded.

This already makes social referencing a real part of canine social learning. The dog is not simply copying motion. It is using another individual's appraisal as information about the world.

Beyond Face and Voice: The Physiological Layer

The owner-state literature extends the mechanism beyond facial expression and tone of voice.

Dogs can discriminate human baseline and stress odors, and exposure to stress odor from unfamiliar humans changes their cognition and learning performance. Documented This is important because it shows that the dog does not need a dramatic visible performance from the human for human state to matter. There is a documented olfactory path by which stress becomes social information.

Owner psychological profile matters too. Studies of dog-human dyads found that owner personality, especially Neuroticism and insecure attachment variables, predicts lower HPA-axis flexibility in dogs, while the dog's own personality contributes much less to that physiological pattern. Documented

Those findings do not turn social referencing into a single hormonal theory. They do show that the social partner's state is not only cognitively interpreted. It is also biologically consequential.

Why the Topic Matters

Social referencing matters because it changes how uncertainty is understood in dogs.

A dog confronting novelty is not making that judgment alone in a social vacuum. If the dog is attached to and oriented toward a person, the person's reaction becomes part of the dog's appraisal process. That helps explain why two dogs can meet similar novelty but respond differently under different human partners.

This does not mean a single anxious moment from a human permanently programs a dog. It does mean that human state is not behaviorally irrelevant.

Important Boundaries

Three cautions matter here.

First, the social-referencing findings are documented, but the stronger claim that a calm or anxious caregiver permanently creates a specific long-term appraisal style is more interpretive unless directly tracked over time.

Second, the olfactory stress studies used unfamiliar human stress odor. That is a strong demonstration of a sensory mechanism, but it does not by itself map the full chronic familiar-owner pathway.

Third, the owner personality findings are associational. They document a relationship between owner profile and dog cortisol flexibility. They do not prove that changing owner personality would automatically resolve every corresponding canine outcome.

The Evidence

Sources

• Fugazza, C., et al. (2018). Presence and lasting effect of social referencing in dog puppies. Animal Behaviour, 141, 57-65.
• Merola, I., Prato-Previde, E., & Marshall-Pescini, S. (2012). Dogs' social referencing towards owners and strangers. PLOS ONE, 7(10), e47653.
• Parr-Cortes, Z., et al. (2024). The odour of an unfamiliar stressed or relaxed person affects dogs' cognition and learning. Scientific Reports, 14, 1242.
• Schoberl, I., et al. (2016). Social factors influencing cortisol modulation in dogs during a strange situation procedure. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 11, 77-85.
• Schoberl, I., et al. (2017). Psychobiological factors affecting cortisol variability in human-dog dyads. PLOS ONE, 12(2), e0170707.
• Wilson, C., et al. (2022). Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and stress odours. PLOS ONE, 17(9), e0274143.