If you have an Internet connection, you've probably read at least one article in the past few days claiming that science has shown that dogs hate being hugged (and if you don't have an Internet connection, kudos on somehow accessing this blog post). We at Speaking of Science are not here to argue that you should go squeeze the life out of a puppy. But we are here to squeeze the life out of this misleading science coverage.
According to numerous outlets, a scientific study has found that the majority of dogs dislike being hugged, based on cues of distress found in a random assortment of photos pulled from the Internet.
The problem here is that what's being reported as a "study" is, in fact, an op-ed written in the magazine Psychology Today by a single researcher.
"This is a set of casual observations," Stanley Coren, the retired University of British Columbia professor who penned the column, told The Post. He reiterated that his data collection wasn't part of a peer-reviewed study.
Peer review is a process that all scientific studies should go through. It's a fancy way of saying that other scientists – ones who don't have a vested interest in the study's success – have vetted it as being sound. Not all peer-reviewed studies are right or even good, but it's a basic benchmark for scientific research. It means someone other than the study lead has looked at the data and deemed it legitimate, and that other scientists have had the chance to poke holes in the study's methodology and conclusions.
(Once a peer-reviewed study exists out in the world, we shouldn't really say anything can be concluded from it one way or another until other scientists have performed more experiments and come up with the same results, because one never really knows what unknown factors or biases might make a result pop up once or twice in a blue moon – but that's another issue entirely.)
If the data isn't published, no one can really comment on it. Several animal behavior researchers I contacted said as much – they couldn't really tell me whether or not they agreed with Coren's conclusions, because they had no real sense of what kind of data collection he'd done.
"This is interesting preliminary data which might serve as a good starting point for a formal study," Evan MacLean, co-director of Duke's Canine Cognition Center, wrote in an email. "But it's important to note that (to my knowledge) this is not a peer-reviewed empirical paper so I would caution against any firm conclusions before the work can go through this important part of the scientific process."
