MRC_Hans said:
Certainly not a sharp line between those. Say you're a Moslem, and you drink alcohol (moderately); that ought to give you a bad conscience. If you are a Catolic, however, it shouldn't. So that is more or less a form of conditioned behaviour.
You will notice that dogs can also show signs of bad conscience about things that are none of their fault, say a picture fell down and broke while the dog was home alone; it feels responsible for looking after the house, and something went wrong anyway. But of course this is all speculative, since we cannot actually ask an animal what it feels.
Interestingly, cats, while roughly as intelligent as dogs, seem to have no conscience at all. It must be a trait of a flock animal.
Hans
Hmmm--to me, the fundamental aspect of conscience is knowing in advance that the commission of certain acts is wrong. Although there's doubtless a conditioned behaviour aspect in the development of conscience (and I could digress endlessly on the variety of ways that humans generalise punishment, but I won't
) I'm not too sure that dogs understand that certain acts are wrong, but only that they will result in punishment (although strictly speaking in conditioning theory there's no such thing as punishment, only positive and negative re-inforcers). For instance, my dog knew that taking food without permission would result in punishment, but I'm not sure if she had a conscience because she would take any opportunity to sneak food if she thought she wasn't being detected. So it wasn't the act itself that was to be avoided, but being caught. And the way she associted being caught with the presence of humans meant it was a dead give away when she had been doing wrong.
But cats certainly are contrary creatures, aren't they? Trying to train them not to do stuff just seems to make doing stuff more attractive. It reminds me of Eddie Izzard's "Pavlov's Cat" sketch:
"Day 1: Rang bell, cat f*cked off, oh dear.
Day 2: Rang bell, cat went and answered door
Day 3: Rang bell, cat said he'd eaten earlier cheeky bugger
Day4: Went to ring bell, but cat had stolen batteries
Final day Day 5: Went to ring bell with new batteries, but cat put paw on bell so it only made a thunk noise. Then cat rang his own bell, I ate food."
) dogs that were individually trained and none of them would take the food in similar situation.
). With dog and cats (many animals, in fact) we know that punishment has to be contextual (as soon as the act is discovered) otherwise they don't associate the punishment with the act. Well, to be accurate, one of my cats associates the punishment with characteristics of the person giving the punishment, and the other one doesn't give a toss either way.
