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Dogs display behaviors that can give people the feeling of a shared experience and mutual understanding. Dogs monitor human behavior closely, are sensitive to human actions and attentional states, and act in accordance with humans in coordinated and synchronized ways. For example, when unable to access a desired item, dogs may alternate their gaze between the item and a person to direct the person to retrieve it (Miklósi et al. 2000). Even as puppies, dogs readily respond to human communicative gestures, whether stemming from hands, the face, (e.g., the eyes), or other body parts (Reid 2009; Riedel et al. 2008). This propensity is even observed in some free‐ranging dogs (Bhattacharjee et al. 2020), and personality, enculturation, and reinforcement history could also affect outcomes. Dogs take note of human attentional states from the eyes as well as head and body orientation—a dog being more likely to remove a muffin from a countertop if a person’s back is turned or eyes are closed than if the person’s eyes are open (Schwab and Huber 2006). Dogs discriminate human emotional expressions such as happy and angry faces (Müller et al. 2015). A number of dogs have proved extraordinarily attentive and responsive to human language (Kaminski et al. 2004; Pilley and Reid 2011). Not all dogs attend to verbal cues (Ramos and Mills 2019), and the emotional content, tone, and intonation of human vocalizations are particularly relevant. Behavioral synchronization—staying close to and moving in pace with a person—has been observed in owned dogs and, to a lesser extent, between shelter dogs and caretakers (Duranton and Gaunet 2018). Dogs and humans also play together, and these vastly different species can attend to each other’s play signals; a dog’s play bow—or a person’s play lunge—is often responded to meaningfully (Rooney et al. 2001). People visiting a shelter searching for their new best friend may not be aware of the complex social exchanges underlying the dog‐human relationship, but they may have experienced it with another dog and may even be seeking it out.