Self-control has been shown to be linked with being cooperative and successful in humans and with the g-factor in chimpanzees. As such, it is likely to play an important role in all forms of problem-solving. Self-control, however, does not just vary across individuals but seems also to be dependent on the ecological niche of the respective species. With dogs having been selected to live in the human environment, several domestication hypotheses have predicted that dogs are better at self-control and thus more tolerant of longer delays than wolves. Here we set out to test this prediction by comparing dogs’ and wolves’ self-control abilities using a delay of gratification task where the animals had to wait for a predefined delay duration to exchange a low-quality reward for a high-quality reward. We found that in our task, dogs outperformed the wolves waiting an average of 66 s vs. 24 s in the wolves. Food quality did not influence how long the animals waited for the better reward. However, dogs performed overall better in motivation trials than the wolves, although the dogs’ performance in those trials was dependent on the duration of the delays in the test trials, whereas this was not the case for the wolves. Overall, the data suggest that selection by humans for traits influencing self-control rather than ecological factors might drive self-control abilities in wolves and dogs. However, several other factors might contribute or explain the observed differences including the presence of the humans, which might have inhibited the dogs more than the wolves, lower motivation of the wolves compared to the dogs to participate in the task and/or wolves having a better understanding of the task contingencies. These possible explanations need further exploration.

中文翻译：

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在满足任务方面，狗比狼等待更长的时间来获得更好的回报：但是为什么呢？

自我控制已被证明与正在合作，成功在人类和与被链接摹黑猩猩的主要因素。这样，它很可能在所有形式的问题解决中发挥重要作用。但是，自我控制不仅会因个体而异，而且还取决于各个物种的生态位。由于已经选择了在人类环境中生活的狗，因此一些驯化假设已预测，狗的自我控制能力更强，因此比狼更能容忍更长的延迟时间。在这里，我们着手通过延迟满足任务比较狗和狼的自我控制能力来检验这种预测，在这种情况下，动物必须等待预定义的延迟时间才能将低质量的奖励交换为高质量的奖励。我们发现，在我们的任务中，狗的平均表现要优于狼，平均等待时间为66 s，而等待时间为24 s。食品质量没有影响动物等待更好奖励的时间。但是，尽管在那些试验中，狗的表现取决于试验试验中的延迟时间，但在动机试验中，犬的总体表现要好于狼，但对于狼而言，情况并非如此。总体而言，数据表明，人类选择影响自我控制而非生态因素的性状可能会驱动狼和狗的自我控制能力。但是，其他一些因素也可能有助于或解释观察到的差异，包括人的存在，与狗相比，这可能比狗对狗的抑制更大，与狗相比，狼的动机更弱和/或具有狼的狼。更好地了解任务的紧急情况。