Cuteness as a Survival Adaptation - NY Times

The Cute Factor - Natalie Angier, NY Times, Jan. 3, 2006

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

Comments

[Rick Jones]

My sister made the observation many years ago when she was raising her children that cuteness in babies was a form of "protective coloration".

[Tobias S Haller BSG]

An interesting exhibit last year at the Japan Society in NYC focused on the kawaii phenomenon. It was interesting to reflect that Hello Kitty has no mouth and very short arms, and represents passivity and inability to express anything other than "cute."