What is Socialization
Socialization means habituation, or getting used to environmental elements through exposure to them. In a natural setting, it is highly adaptive to increase distance between yourself and anything unusual and then to proceed with extreme caution when approaching. This is because unusual things are potentially very bad news. (They certainly aren’t necessary for survival because you’ve made it this far without them.) Animals adhere to rules governing social distance. So do we, if you think about it. We tolerate someone standing right against us in a crowded elevator but would be instantly spooked by the same person standing that close if we were the only two in the elevator. Someone can walk up and stand right behind you if you’re in a line-up at the grocery store, but someone doing exactly the same thing when you’re in the driveway washing your car is a whole other story. We can also, like other animals, be very weird about being touched.
In animals, curiosity is antagonistic to fear, and usually less pronounced. While it is potentially adaptive to explore novel things in case they yield some advantage, (especially in the case of predators), excessive curiosity would eventually result in exposure to danger and hence reproductive disadvantage. In other words, the cost of a false positive (spooking away from something that is in fact harmless or beneficial) is greatly outweighed by the cost of a false negative (failing to spook away from something that is dangerous). You can’t pass on those curious genes if you’re dead or injured. Consider, for instance, that you’d think about any wild animal in the forest that didn’t flee from you or didn’t put on an aggressive display if you cornered it. Would you think he was a “nice†animal or would you think he was, say, sick? Avoidance of novelty is the default setting for animals. All these truths about animals are pretty self-evident. And, lest we forget, dogs are animals.
Because it would not be adaptive for animals to be continuously spooking at rocks and trees and bird song, a mechanism is wired in to ensure the animal habituates to normal environmental features. This is the socialization period, a finite time when young animals are much less fearful and are much more likely to approach and investigate novel things. And they readily form social bonds.
Adult animals can habituate to novel things too; it simply takes much longer. The socialization window cannot remain open forever. If it did, then you could have animals trotting up to you in the forest. Every species of animal has acquired, through natural selection, an average time to assimilate and accept things in their environment. After this period, they will behave to increase distance, through fight/flight mechanisms, from anything to which they have not been socialized. There is also a “use it or lose it†clause; some animals will become increasingly fearful of things they may have encountered in the critical period but see too seldom thereafter.
Notice that the pressure is always in the direction of increasing fearfulness and avoidance, never the other way. Artificial pressure needs to be constantly exerted to get animals to behave tolerantly. It must be actively bred for and/or installed in the socialization period and maintained thereafter. As soon as there is any weakness in this system, the animal starts leaning towards fight/flight. By definition, the socialization period, be it one day or several months, is what works well for that species in the environment in which it evolved. In the case of domestic dogs, the socialization window closes somewhere between three and five months of age, depending on the breed and individual make-up, with easy habituation drying up by around four-and-a-half months of age in the majority of cases. These thresholds are a matter of consensus, by the way, not strong empirical research. Many of us would really, really like to know what’s going on regarding critical socialization periods in dogs, and any relevant details regarding breed differences. The trend among hard-core dog people is toward earlier and earlier formal socialization, ie; puppy classes for puppies in the seven-to eleven-week old range. There is increasing willingness to balance the socialization imperative with the need for pathogen avoidance in young puppies with inadequate immunity.
The importance of a critical period for socialization is hard to overestimate. If, for instance, a puppy doesn’t get sufficient exposure to men with beards before the socialization clock runs out, the risk for fear responses and aggression at men with beards runs higher for that dog as an adult. It’s particularly wrinkly because dogs are expert discriminators: adequate socialization to women or eight-year old kids, for example, does not guarantee a generalization to men or two-year-old kids. Therefore, it’s advisable to go way overboard covering all the bases before the socialization window closes, especially for spookier breeds or individuals. This means exposing the puppy to as wide a social sphere as possible in terms of human age groups, sexes, sizes, shapes, colors and gaits. The experiences should be positive (play, treats, nothing scary) and include a wide variety of patting, handling and movement by the humans. It also means getting the puppy use to anything it may have to encounter in later life, such as car rides, veterinary exams (make the first one or two fun rather than scary), cats, traffic, soccer games, elevators, and pointy sticks.
