Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies.  This does seem plausible.  Babies are pretty cute, after all.  It's a tempting explanation.

Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.

And this is a bunny.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture.  In fact, bunnies are edible.  By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be "mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit".  But instead, that bunny - and not the baby or any other baby I've seen - strikes the epicenter of my cuteness response, and being more baby-like along any dimension would not improve the bunny.  It would not look better bald.  It would not be improved with little round humanlike ears.  It would not be more precious with thumbs, easier to love if it had no tail, more adorable if it were enlarged to weigh about seven pounds.

If "awwww" is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go "awwww" is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed.  Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don't seem badly targeted in this way.  If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it's not in most people.  (Furries, for instance, exist, but they're not a common variation on human sexual interest - the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.)  We've invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that's a departure from the ancestral environment - bunnies?  All natural, every whisker.1

It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works.  Why are babies cute?  They have to be, so we'll take care of them.  And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever.  You can have this entire conversation without mentioning bunnies (or kittens or jerboas or any other adorable thing).  But by excluding those items from a discussion that is, ostensibly, about cuteness, you do not have a hypothesis that actually fits all of the data - only the data that seems relevant to the answer that presents itself immediately.

Evo-psych explanations are tempting even when they're cheaply wrong, because the knowledge you need to construct ones that sound good to the educated is itself not cheap at all. You have to know lots of stuff about what "motivates" evolutionary changes, reject group selection, understand that the brain is just an organ, dispel the illusion of little XML tags attached to objects in the world calling them "cute" or "pretty" or anything else - but you also have to account for a decent proportion of the facts to not be steering completely left of reality.

Humans are frickin' complicated beasties.  It's a hard, hard job to model us in a way that says anything useful without contradicting information we have about ourselves.  But that's no excuse for abandoning the task.  What causes the cuteness response?  Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable?  Why are babies, well, pretty cute?  I don't know - but I'm pretty sure it's not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn't want me to nurture bunnies.  Inasmuch as it wants me to react to bunnies, it wants me to eat them, or at least be motivated to keep them away from my salad fixings.

 

1It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me.  In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

Comments (823)

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Comment author: LauraABJ 22 February 2010 02:50:29AM 44 points [-]

I would find this argument much more convincing if it were supported by people who actually have children. My mother goes beserk over a smiling infant in a way I cannot begin to comprehend (I am usually afraid I will accidentally hurt them). My husband, likewise, has an instant affinity for babies and always tries to communicate and play with them. He was raised Jewish with the idea that it is unclean to have animals in the home and does not find animals particularly adorable. In our culture we are inundated with anthropomorphised images of animals in television and given stuffed toys and pets that we take care of like children. It's not that surprising that we find animals cute when we focus so much attention on them as if they were little people. I do not know that such evaluations of 'cuteness' would hold cross-culturally, especially in cultures where people do kill and eat 'cute' animals on a regular basis.

Comment author: inklesspen 22 February 2010 03:49:35AM *  3 points [-]

Other hominids have been known to keep pets. I would not be surprised if cetaceans were capable of this as well, though it would obviously be more difficult to demonstrate.

Comment author: mattalyst 22 February 2010 03:57:29PM 35 points [-]

"Drastically misaimed" really says nothing about whether or not a cuteness instinct would be a good adaptation, though. A counterexample: it's a fact that our visual systems are acutely sensitive to rapidly-moving things. The evo-bio hypothesis is that this is predator detection. Does the fact that 99.999999% of the rapidly-moving things I notice aren't predators negate this hypothesis as well?

I can't think of very many cases in which people endanger themselves or their reproductive chances for the sake of cute animals. I'm sure it's happened once or twice, but using this argument means demonstrating that the number of potential children lost due to finding bunnies cute is greater than the number of actual children attended to due to finding them cute.

As an aside, I think that Google in this case is adding to the confusion. The evo-bio cuteness theory is generally stated as being about a system that detects facial markers that strongly differentiate babies from adults - the key ones being eyes large relative to head size, pursed mouths, round cheeks, and round chins. Some baby animals, when viewed up close in Google, display some of these characteristics. In the wild, however, baby animals are almost never seen up close, and even when they are, they trigger the facial recognition systems only in dribs and drabs, like bad CG.

Comment author: HughRistik 22 February 2010 07:24:11PM *  7 points [-]

mattalyst said:

A counterexample: it's a fact that our visual systems are acutely sensitive to rapidly-moving things. The evo-bio hypothesis is that this is predator detection. Does the fact that 99.999999% of the rapidly-moving things I notice aren't predators negate this hypothesis as well?

Nope, because the rapidly-moving things that are predators matter way more. False negatives in predator-detection are more costly than false positives by orders of magnitude.

I can't think of very many cases in which people endanger themselves or their reproductive chances for the sake of cute animals. I'm sure it's happened once or twice, but using this argument means demonstrating that the number of potential children lost due to finding bunnies cute is greater than the number of actual children attended to due to finding them cute.

Excellent observation. Perhaps some people find baby animals of other species cuter due to evolutionary baggage from common ancestors, which has never needed to go away because it didn't hurt our reproductive success.

n the wild, however, baby animals are almost never seen up close, and even when they are, they trigger the facial recognition systems only in dribs and drabs, like bad CG.

That's my intuition, also.

Comment author: George 24 February 2010 01:23:39AM 2 points [-]

"I can't think of very many cases in which people endanger themselves or their reproductive chances for the sake of cute animals." A) Drivers swerving to avoid cats and bunnies etc. B) All the warnings about leaving bear cubs alone. I can think of non-cuteness explanations that probably cover some part of each but it seems idle to reject any role for cuteness in those survivability risks.

Comment author: iii 21 October 2012 05:38:05PM *  5 points [-]

I think that any situation that could not have occurred prior to the 20. century can be discarded out of hand when discussing the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 October 2012 10:32:20PM 2 points [-]

<nitpick>In English it's not idiomatic to write ordinal numbers by adding a full stop after the cardinal, as it is in German. Normally one writes “20th” (with the “th” optionally superscripted).</nitpick>

Comment author: MichaelVassar 22 February 2010 07:50:36PM 30 points [-]

I agree that evolutionary psychology is very prone to abuse and should probably usually be avoided, but this seems like a terrible example to me. The hypothesis that cuteness is our evolved response to baby-like features does NOT predict that babies will be the cutest thing.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:23:47PM 5 points [-]

Very compactly put. The data simply do not contradict the theory in the first place.

Comment author: Tiiba 22 February 2010 06:53:36AM *  26 points [-]

I wanted to say this for a long time: human babies aren't cute. Certainly not newborns. If I didn't know better, and saw a newborn, I would perform an exorcism. They look like creatures from the Uncanny Valley.

Edit: Seventeen points? Maybe I should make this a top-level post. Opinions?

First I lose about that many from a very thoughtful post because of my unusual sense of humor. Then I gain them back on... this? People, start making sense.

Comment author: Dustin 22 February 2010 07:51:34PM 14 points [-]

1 year ago, I would have completely agreed.

Then we had a baby, and now I see cuteness in babies all over the place. None as cute as my baby, though.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 22 February 2010 01:40:31PM *  7 points [-]

I note that cuteoverload.com has no babies on it, as far as I can tell. Cats, dogs, and little balls of feathery fuzz, but no babies.

Comment author: prase 24 February 2010 10:24:27AM 1 point [-]

Upvoted because of the edit. But don't make this a top-level post, please.

Comment author: ChrisPine 22 February 2010 03:44:01PM 24 points [-]

Don't any of you have children?? Newborn babies are one thing, but there's a cuteness of seeing small, perfect little versions of yourself or your mate... I don't think a bunny could really compete.

No, other people's babies aren't that cute, but mine sure as hell are.

And in any case, I don't really see how this relates to... whatever it is you are saying about ev-psych (or the deeper mystery of cuteness). Why would you expect evolution to make us only find human babies cute? Evolution only has to work hard enough to keep us from abandoning our babies, and to hell with the (bunny-related) side-effects. Why would evolution care how cute you think bunnies are, as long as it's not so much that you start eating your babies and raising rabbits?

Comment author: brazil84 22 February 2010 04:14:35PM 2 points [-]

That thought occurred to me too. Evolutionarily, if our sexual instincts are very strong and well aimed, the cuteness instinct arguably doesn't need to be so precise.

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 03:37:19AM *  19 points [-]

How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.

(Edit, Also: Human babies may have evolved to be uglier for other reasons -less hair, bigger heads- and those features may have been selected for more than cuteness.)

Edit 2: Metaphorically, our cuteness program is like running Netscape Navigator 1.0 or something. It sort of does the trick but isn't exactly adapted for modern uses

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 02:56:14PM 7 points [-]

I agree with Jack: large eyes embedded in a small puffy face are general mammalian triggers for cuteness. Humans thinking that kittens are cute is just an accident.

Though 'accident' isn't the right word. Mammalian mechanisms are simply very general among mammals and robust. I read this somewhere and assimilated it as obviously true. And then I experienced how true it was when I had kids.

We're always 'being mammals' but I guess we're somewhat desensitized to the mammalian things we do every day. During pregnancy, childbirth and raising a child, a whole slew of new behaviors are activated and it's just amazing to realize the extent to which behaviors are instinctual and rely on physical mechanisms like tactile stimulation, visual cues and internal timers.

Breast-feeding of course. Did you know that breast-feeding is an interactive activity, where the baby has to suck of course, but also the mother needs to 'let down' the milk supply? Tactile stimulation (like sucking or kneading) will trigger 'let down', but also it can be triggered if the mother just thinks about her baby being cute. Women often have a lot of trouble 'pumping' milk for later use because the apparatus doesn't mimic human babies very well. Even if it mimics the way a child sucks during the first 30 seconds, the longer scale 5-15 minute temporal dynamics are missing. There's a difference between the milking patterns at the beginning and the end.

A few months before birth there's the nesting behavior, and then the timing of labor is a very complex, oscillatory process with many false and half starts.

Other timing mechanisms include the biological clock that makes women more inclined to want children, ovulation, the multi-stage birth event itself, lactation rhythyms as mothers and babies fine-tune and adjust over weeks and months. One of the most amazing examples of this, for me, was that I noticed a 1-3 minute pattern in the way I attended to my children. Especially someplace where they were amused and relatively safe but possibly in and out of sight, like at the park. For 1 to 2 minutes, I would just think my own thoughts, possibly chat on the phone or look through a magazine. After about 2 minutes, I noticed a growing anxiety that would not be relieved until I spotted my child. found this very curious and played around with it, deliberately not looking for my child for small periods of time to determine how regular this mechanism was. It seemed very regular.

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 03:01:22PM 2 points [-]

I agree with Jack: large eyes embedded in a small puffy face are general mammalian triggers for cuteness. Humans thinking that kittens are cute is just an accident.

Then I repeat my question: please give examples of non-primate mammalian behaviors that indicate the animal found an animal of a different species "cute".

A second question: does your theory allows distinguishing between "cuteness" reaction and nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior?

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 03:35:06PM 2 points [-]

A second question: does your theory allows distinguishing between "cuteness" reaction and nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior?

Mine doesn't. I think that instinctual mechanisms for "nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior" is a really big deal for mammals, so much so that the mechanisms have a tendency to be overly robust. (E.g., some men lactate.) However, I would defer to an expert on this, and would ask one (read a book) if something rested upon the question.

please give examples of non-primate mammalian behaviors that indicate the animal found an animal of a different species "cute".

I look forward to the day when we can scan an animal brain and see what they think and feel. Till then, I can't comment on whether animals think their babies are 'cute'. There's no doubt though that nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior is triggered across species. However it seems context-dependent: the parenting animal must have reason to consider the baby part of the family. So domesticated animals are likely to show this behavior to other pets and babies. (My cat tried to teach my first baby how to hunt when she started crawling, but didn't bother with the second.) Birds will take care of other birds if they're in the nest, etc. And of course there's Tarzan, which might have been based on some kind of observation of this kind.

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 05:15:44PM 1 point [-]

I look forward to the day when we can scan an animal brain and see what they think and feel. Till then, I can't comment on whether animals think their babies are 'cute'.

I think 'response-to-cute-stimuli' can be usefully defined on a behavioral level too.

I suggest this definition: the animal is interested in the cute-animal, often despite being strangers; it spends time looking at it or touching it, plays with it or talks to it (depending on the animal's species-typical behavior). But it eventually forgets about it, leaves it behind (or allows it to depart), and does not protect or feed it - as it would an adopted baby. Doing these last things goes beyond "owww it's cute!" and constitutes parenting behavior.

The question is - do animals reliably exhibit non-parenting behavior of the sort described above, and towards what patterns of other animals?

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 22 February 2010 03:38:58AM 6 points [-]

That would explain how it is we can find rabbits cute at all. But to find them equally or more cute than human babies would seem to not be explained by your answer.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 07:27:37AM *  4 points [-]

How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.

Because I don't consider it plausible. The 'cuteness' response is just far more malleable than the, you know, bit where you aren't a rabbit. See, for example, all the other sensory preferences that are are finely honed per species.

EDIT: I will add that it is slightly more plausible to me that rabbits are cute because they look more like baby ancestral primates than baby humans do on some key features (little and fury). Even so I would be reluctant to assign too much confidence to such a theory.

Comment author: djcb 25 February 2010 06:47:00AM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure the answer is so obvious.

For example, baby pinguins and other birds can be very cute; baby lizards usually aren't. I think the theory goes that we've evolved from something that looks somewhat lizardy, but definitely not like a bird.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 07:13:56AM 5 points [-]

cute lizard

I rest my case.

Comment author: Jack 25 February 2010 07:05:25AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, it definitely isn't a perfect theory. It is obvious in the sense that it is the logical conclusion to come to if you held the Dennet theory and then had alicorn's evidence presented to you. The main thing is that there is no reason to think that the cuteness instinct is a product of recent evolution.

Comment author: Unnamed 22 February 2010 07:12:01AM *  2 points [-]

Do we know whether adult rabbits find baby rabbits cute? If not, that would count against the common ancestor hypothesis.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 10:32:37PM *  1 point [-]

How come everyone is missing the obvious answer?

Good question. It didn't appear until here. The obvious answer is that cuteness does in fact serve purposes distinct from making people nurture every baby they come across.

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 10:40:49PM 1 point [-]

I don't get it. This other purpose is nutritive?

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 10:48:33PM 1 point [-]

Maintaining a food source until a better time to eat it seems like a somewhat better reason to find bunnies cute than because they look like babies. Particularly because eating or at least killing other people's babies is a strategy that some of our near primate relatives use. Significant evidence could persuade me but I'm just not seeing it.

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 10:53:14PM *  3 points [-]

There may be reasons for experiencing "cute" besides stimulating parental care, but I'm skeptical about the food-source-theory because I think things are cute independent of their nutritive value. The only connection may be that adult herbivores tend be cuter than adult carnivores, and they also taste better.

Nevertheless, I was thinking about what kinds of food I think are cute. And this brought me in an entirely different direction. Anything miniature is cute. (Even a mini-paperclip.) Is this a different sense of cute again? Is our parental duty stimulated so broadly we can experience it in response to a mini-hamburger?

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 11:01:50PM 2 points [-]

That's an interesting take on it. I was going along a similar train of thought of 'anything miniature is cute'. I just didn't interpret it as parental. I took it as 'Miniature things are barely worth it but are growing extremely fast. Throw it back and eat it when it is ten times the nutritional value in a couple of weeks!' My surprise would then be that we experience even in response to things that are not a 'mini-burger'. I'm not going to benefit from eating clippy unless I am iron deficient and I embed him in an apple for a while to rust before I eat it!

Comment author: joaolkf 05 March 2010 01:05:45PM *  16 points [-]

A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness. Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.

Comment author: johnsonmx 24 October 2012 10:55:38PM 2 points [-]

Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn't a strong argument against Dennett's hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.

I think this argument could be analogously phrased: "The reason why exercise makes us feel good can't be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise." Seems wrong when we put it that way.

Comment author: adamisom 15 January 2012 12:48:23AM 1 point [-]

Upvoted for a better understanding of ev psych.

That's kind of the whole point of ev psych, at least for me: our minds are kluges, and side effects hardly factor in if they have little survival disadvantage.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 22 February 2010 11:45:59AM 15 points [-]

Maybe the bunny has evolutionarily converged on the mammal shared cuteness pattern, but the baby has been forced to diverge by other pressures? Human babies are born very underdeveloped relative to other species. I've read speculation that this is due to the upright walking, hip shape, head size, brain size compromise, and that seems sensible to me. Cuteness optimization may have been shoved aside as lower priority.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 March 2011 06:57:45PM *  9 points [-]

Alicorn:

In fact, bunnies are edible.

Babies are edible too. Cannibalistic infanticide is a fairly common phenomenon throughout the animal world. It is widely practiced by chimpanzees, some of the closest evolutionary relatives of humans. (It's mostly done by male chimpanzees, but sometimes also females; see the linked paper for more details and references.)

Unless some group-selection mechanism is in operation (and such explanations are always controversial), there is no straightforward reason why one should care about unrelated babies. Killing them may well be adaptive behavior. Infanticide is thus unsurprisingly a widespread phenomenon in nature -- and once you kill a baby, you might as well eat it too; hence cannibalistic infanticide. Even when it comes to one's own kids and relatives, there are situations where killing them may be cost-effective in selfish gene terms, and parental and kin infanticide is also far from nonexistent among animals. All these behaviors are a regular subject of study in evolutionary biology, including evolutionary psychology.

Therefore, noting that babies can look less cute than other things whose only relevant characteristics are nutritional is hardly an argument against state-of-the-art evolutionary psychology. It is certainly a good argument against dilettantish dabbling in it, which is indeed all too common, even by otherwise formidable intellectual figures such as Dennett. Of course, the real academic evolutionary psychology has its own problems with sorting out well-substantiated theories from just-so stories, but they are at wholly different levels.

Comment author: bgrah449 22 February 2010 03:46:46PM *  9 points [-]

It seems very oversimplified to say, "We think babies are cute because we have to." "Cuteness" casts a pretty wide net when you start thinking of all the things we say are "cute." A sample list of things I've heard described as cute:

  • Babies
  • Bunnies
  • Targets of sexual attraction
  • Small consumer goods, such as tiny containers of shampoo, small forks, etc.
  • Some old men
  • Targets of sarcastic comments ("That's real cute, but .. ")

It seems like we reserve the word for "things that are vulnerable/harmless/ineffective and don't realize it, which then triggers an urge to keep the thing's inaccurate self-perceptions about its own effectiveness intact."

Comment author: Blueberry 24 February 2010 02:04:18AM 6 points [-]

This is confusing the map with the territory. We use the word "cute" for all those things, but we don't feel the same way about them all, and we don't mean the same thing by that word in most of those cases.

Comment author: Blueberry 24 February 2010 02:54:50AM 4 points [-]

I was asked to clarify and expand this comment, so:

The original post was about a particular feeling that humans often have in certain situations, a feeling that is often triggered by looking at young animals. This feeling is something that exists in the real world (the territory).

We use the word "cute" (among others) to describe something triggering this experience. This is part of our map of the world. However, no word unambiguously refers to just one thing in the real world. That's just not how language works. As it happens, the word "cute" is commonly used to refer to lots of other things as well. Targets of sexual attraction may be said to be "cute", but in a different way than bunnies or kitties, though these may be related. Using the word "cute" sarcastically is a very different use of the word with a completely different meaning. My original point was that if something is described as "cute", that may be a similarity on the map but not the territory.

I may use the same word for a sexually attractive human, a kitten, a small fork, an old man, and a sarcastic comment (map similarity). But for each one, I may mean something completely different, and I may have a completely different response with a separate type of explanation (territory difference).

Comment author: bgrah449 24 February 2010 05:05:51AM 3 points [-]

tl;dr: Cuteness is the word that we use when we want something to experience a feeling of safety or otherwise be more confident than we think they would feel without special effort to make them feel that way.

Thanks for expanding. I want to throw out a warning that we're treading dangerously close to the foul line, but I think we're still in-bounds.

Using the word "cute" sarcastically is a very different use of the word with a completely different meaning.

I understand the general point that words can have different meanings, and I'm open to the possibility that I'm falling victim to the typical mind fallacy. I don't have any alternate meanings suggested yet, so I'm going to try to preemptively defend my definition below.

I want to test this hypothesis with a visualization experiment. I don't expect it will take longer than about 2 minutes to do all of the visualizations. This is the scene I want you to imagine: the person, animal, or object is standing or sitting, whichever can be expected of it. If it's a person, he or she has a blank, unsmiling, neutral, unaggressive facial expression. If it's an animal, its face is similarly at rest. It's facing either Data or Spock (take your pick). Imagine Data or Spock saying the sentence out loud to the person, animal, or object.

  • 52" plasma television set - It's flipping through many channels, previewing each one for about a second; someone is channel-surfing. "You will be replaced by better, cheaper technology in less than a year."

  • Baby - "You would test very low on an IQ test. You will continue to be a net resource drain for several years."

  • Sexiest person alive - Doesn't matter who or what gender - this person is desired greatly, and desired primarily for their ability to satisfy you, personally, sexually. Take a minute and picture this person facing Data or Spock. "Your opinion isn't respected in virtually any matter; people agree with it out of hope they'll be able to sleep with you."

  • Bunny - "In a year's time, you will be harvested and your muscles will be cooked in a soup."

  • Cute boy or girl - Crucially, "cute" describes a particular type of attractive person. Imagine a person you would describe as cute, but not a person who is attractive who could not be described as cute. For me (and some others), "attractive but not cute" is a category that includes "hot," for example. If the word "cute" is a synoynm for "attractive" with perfect overlap, skip this question and note it below. If you imagined a girl: "You are valued for your womb and your abilities as a nanny. Men will want you for a wife but will consistently lust after other women for their sexual satisfaction." If you imagined a boy: "Women will tolerate your lovemaking, but you will be valued for your patience and because your timidity makes women around you feel outgoing, bold, and charismatic."

  • Hyena - "You will never have the opportunity to reproduce."

  • Tiny shampoo bottle - Imagine a small carnation-pink shampoo bottle, perhaps 2 inches tall. It has a white, spherical cap. The spherical cap has a very small, intricate, carnation-pink ribbon affixed atop it, as if it were a Christmas gift. "Throw this bottle away; its small volume makes it effectively worthless as a shampoo container."

  • An old man - Imagine an old man who could be perceived as "cute." Perhaps an old man, short, 90 years old, who walks very slowly, bringing his elderly wife, of roughly the same build, a plate with a sandwich on it, and he's torn the crust off the sandwich because he knows his wife doesn't like it. His hair is combed impeccably over his bald spot. His pants aren't long enough for his legs; they're "highwaters." After he sits next to her, he pats her knee. Now imagine this old man facing Data or Spock. "Your wife is still hiding love letters in her closet from her boyfriend before you, who left her. She still reads them and has never been as satisfied since marrying you."

  • A creepy old man - Leering, sexually active. "You give women the creeps, so you won't have sex again between now and when you die."

Did some of these statements seem meaner than others? Did any of these make you want to say to Data or Spock, "Don't say that!" or "You're going to hurt his/its feelings"? If so, which?

My hypothesis is that the following visualizations will incite, in the typical person, either slight anger at Data or Spock, an instinct to reassure the object at which the unpretty truth is directed, or in some other way some protective behavior, such as an urge to refute the hypothesis especially emphatically for that particular visualization, more than the others: baby, bunny, cute boy/girl, tiny shampoo bottle, old man. My hypothesis is that the following incited either zero emotional response or a non-negative emotional response: TV, sexy person, hyena, creepy old man.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2013 05:28:25PM *  3 points [-]

Interesting. My empathy seems to be working in a weird way.

  • TV set: it doesn't sound mean at all -- it's an inanimate fucking object. (I'm assuming the old TV set will be sold or given away, rather than disposed of or destroyed, otherwise it would sound somewhat mean -- towards the hypothetical person who could otherwise use the TV set, not towards the TV set itself.
  • Baby: not mean at all if the baby is too young to understand, very mean otherwise. By this point, I was thinking that “can they understand?” must be it.
  • Sexy person: somewhat mean. So far, so good; but...
  • Bunny: okay, this does sound kind-of mean, and the bunny most definitely doesn't understand English, so my heuristic was broken. (I'm not sure whether me feeling empathy for a bunny is a bug or a feature.) Next:
  • Cute girl: slightly mean.
  • Cute boy: not mean at all. (But the fact that in certain ways I'm probably more feminine than usual for males might have something to do with that.)
  • Hyena: wow, that does sound somewhat mean (more than for the bunny). WTH? Some part of me must be an Azathoth worshipper.
  • Shampoo bottle: not mean at all. Can't feel empathy for a bottle even if I try to force myself to. (And, as I once already mentioned, I do feel a sliver of empathy for the molecules in this picture when they're hit particularly hard. What's the difference? The fact that I've done moshing which is analogous to thermal collisions but I've never done anything remotely analogous to being a shampoo bottle about to be thrown away?
  • Old man: OMG, telling him that in front of his wife? 'The hell is wrong with you, Mr Spock?
  • Creepy old man: the “You give women the creeps” part doesn't sound mean at all, the “you won't have sex again between now and when you die” sounds extremely mean (but the fact that I'm involuntarily celibate myself probably has something to do with this).
Comment author: [deleted] 23 January 2013 03:51:01PM *  1 point [-]

(I'm not sure whether me feeling empathy for a bunny is a bug or a feature.)

I still don't know, but the fact that I can feel sorry for someone talking to it is definitely a bug. I don't think words should have any non-zero terminal value, they only matter insofar as they have an effect in the listener (and if Omega told me that there's an M-Disc with $literary_work somewhere in intergalactic space where no-one could read it, and offered to give me $10 and destroy the disc, I would totally accept); and (pace certain new-agey bollocks) telling a bunny “In a year's time, you will be harvested and your muscles will be cooked in a soup” won't hurt it any more than telling it anything else.

Comment author: Blueberry 24 February 2010 09:14:01AM 2 points [-]

I want to throw out a warning that we're treading dangerously close to the foul line, but I think we're still in-bounds.

It strikes me that tabooing "cute" might be useful here. Regardless of how we use the word, going back to the OP, what is it we mean when we talk about our reaction to say, a picture of a bunny or a kitty or a baby? For me, it's an "awww" response, coupled with a smile and an urge to hold or pet or protect the animal. I don't feel that way about a miniature object, exactly, or an old man, or a sexually attractive person. At best it's a very muted version of the feeling.

Comment author: prase 24 February 2010 10:02:58AM *  1 point [-]

Response: I have weak negative responses in all cases, inanimate objects included. The negative responses are stronger only in case of both old men. Ordering from the weakest to the strongest may be: plasma TV, sexiest person, shampoo, baby, hyena, bunny, creepy man, 90 years man.

Few disclaimers: a) I am not a native English speaker, so my understanding of "cute" is probably non-standard. b) I have excluded cute boy/girl from classification, since I have no idea what I may imagine. (Maybe related to a.) c) TV set would score much higher if it were an old black and white model from 1960s. d) I feel a difference in severity of revealed incovenient truths. "You will be cooked" is certainly more harsh than "you will be a resource drain". e) It is difficult to answer, since my initial feelings rapidly change as I think about the situations longer. f) I don't see how relevant is this test to the OP.

Comment author: Blueberry 24 February 2010 09:00:28AM 1 point [-]

My responses: negative emotional response for all the humans, except the baby. Especially negative responses for both the old men. Neutral for the TV, baby, bunny, hyena, and shampoo. Did people seriously feel defensive or protective of inanimate objects?

Comment author: bgrah449 24 February 2010 03:40:21PM 7 points [-]

I actually included that because of exactly that response from various girls about objects like hotel shampoo bottles, Japanese candies, a very small salt-shaker, a tiny spoon, etc. It usually goes something like, "Look at that salt shaker; it's so cute." And then I look at the salt shaker and say, "You're worthless because you're too small to be useful." And the girl will go, "Don't say that!" and then immediately grabs the salt shaker.

One time I drew pictures on a piece of scratchpaper in such a way that when a Japanese candy was placed in the middle of it, it looked like I had the candy strung up by chains and was being tortured via electric shock. My co-worker snatched the candy and still hasn't eaten it; it's still in her desk.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 05:17:49PM 1 point [-]

This could have more to do with a reaction to you than to the object. There's no real motivation to love and protect a cute tiny salt shaker, but surely there's also no call to be or simulate being cruel to it. I mean, it can't hear you. If you address it and say nasty things to it, what are the possible motivations for that? Mightn't it make sense on some psychological level to object and work to prevent the outlet of nastiness due to its perceived meaning about and effects on you rather than the saltshaker?

Comment author: bgrah449 24 February 2010 05:33:39PM 3 points [-]

My point is that it's perceived as nasty and cruel at all, rather than bizarre or slightly rude or honest. Imagine it was an excessively large salt shaker - say, several feet tall. And faced it and said, "You're worthless because you're too large to be useful." People would give me a quizzical look, like, what's wrong with this guy? But the instinct wouldn't be to protect the large salt shaker.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 06:07:13PM 2 points [-]

I think this may have to do with liking the object at all, rather than thinking it's cute in particular. If you insulted a painting that I liked (addressing it directly) which I thought was pretty but not cute - "you, painting, have no practical value whatsoever and are too overpriced to justify the space you'd take up on a wall!" - or spoke to a bowl of soup in a restaurant, which I thought was tasty but not cute - "you are too cold, and have too high a potato-to-clam ratio!" - I think that might bother me in the same way it would if you told a cute saltshaker that it was too small to be useful. Expressing harsh opinions of a liked object is seen as hostile.

Comment author: bgrah449 24 February 2010 07:21:06PM 5 points [-]

I'll have to take your word on how it would bother you, but I think a crucial difference is that in the instance of the cute salt shaker, the instinct is to protect - notice that the word used, "cruel," is dependent upon how it's received by the anthropomorphized salt shaker. If I tell the soup, "You're too cold and have too high a potato-to-clam ratio!" - is it seen as cruel or mean? It seems more like it's seen as, like you said, hostile - a statement more about my feelings in intent than the "feelings" of the salt shaker in consequence.

I also understand that I may be putting too much emphasis on your particular words, inferring precision where none was intended, so if that's the case, let me know. But I think in the case of the cute object, I would be seen as a "bully," whereas in the case of the soup or the painting, I'd be seen as generally unpleasant and critical. To the extent that there's a victim with the un-cute objects, it's the person who values them - I have insulted their taste. This is as opposed to the cute object, where the victim is the object itself.

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 11:08:44PM 1 point [-]

Let me break that down

Targets of sexual attraction: I think that most people (Moderate confidence) see different targets of sexual attraction with wildly varying levels of cuteness, and I know that for myself, cuteness is inversely correlated with how directly, physically sexual my attraction is. Furthermore, after I inadvertently modified myself to be attracted to power, cuteness became a bit of horns rather than a halo.

Targets of sarcastic comments: I think that is clear and simple insulting for childishness.

Inanimate objects: I tend to feel protective of quaint equipment, even if it is unlikely to be a valuable historical artifact in the future, but it doesn't seem related to the cuteness response to those objects.

I think that the most important distinction in your list is between cute adult humans and all the others except for sarcasm, which doesn't belong with the rest of them.

Comment author: MichaelHoward 11 March 2010 02:07:17PM 7 points [-]

This study suggests looking at kitten pictures makes you more careful, improving performance in fine-motor dexterity tasks such as mock surgery.

I wonder if this could lower the error rate of computer programmers, and whether I should buy Eliezer a kitten.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 01:09:26PM 2 points [-]

You'd have to give Eliezer a sequence of kittens unless you're hoping that the cuteness of the kitten will have an imprinting effect which will affect Eliezer's reaction to the eventual cat.

Comment author: DSimon 14 March 2011 01:23:55PM 2 points [-]

It would probably be more efficient (and less cruel to the kittens who would eventually lose importance) to just have Eliezer look at a filtered-for-cuteness lolcats picture stream each morning.

Comment author: fmuaddib 23 February 2010 03:00:29PM *  7 points [-]

Here is the final, most likely explanation for the cuteness paradox:

1 - Cuteness genes are positively selected by many things, but the main filter, at least in mammals, is THE MOTHER INVESTMENT. Puppies (humans, bunnies, all of them..) compete for the investment of the mother, because she is the one that feeds them. They cannot feed themselves until they are adults. Cuteness is a deceivement device and (because it costs physical resources) an honest signal for communicating the mother that the deceiver is the puppy most worth of the maternal investment. Even non mammals use cuteness (i.e. birds and other oviparous species) but their cuteness is rarely perceived as so because of the huge physical differences with the mammals, differences that our mammalian brain cannot see as cute but as deformities.

2 - The selective pressure is bigger when the number of puppies is greater, because the competition is more tight.

3 - Female bunnies bears more children. A litter of rabbit kits (baby rabbits) can be as small as a single kit, ranging up to 12 or 13; however there have been litters as big as 18. So the competition is harsh, and consequently the selective pressure on the cuteness genes is bigger.

4 - Women give birth to 1 or 2 children at once on average, consequently the competition and the selective pressure on cuteness genes is greatly inferior to the selective pressure on the bunnies.

5 - Assuming that cuteness is an universal estetic trait (big facial elements, head bigger than the body, small arms, etc.), developed at the same way in all mammalian brains, it is then reasonable to conclude that human babies display cuteness traits, but are not as cute as the bunnies, because those are subject to a much more tight competition.

Findings that can falsify this hypothesis: - the existence of a species of mammals that bears many children at once that are not cuter than those that bears few, provided that those are normally competing for a shortage of resources from the mother. We need to take in consideration other factors as well, like shortage severity, likeness of the mother to drop some of his puppies if attacked or in extreme hostile environments, and so on.

Comment author: George 24 February 2010 01:17:05AM 4 points [-]

Mammals that bear many children less cute than a species that bears few: rats vs guinea pigs. But in any case it is very strange even to suppose that cuteness would be a universal aesthetic.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 24 February 2010 06:29:46AM 3 points [-]

Cuteness is not an universal trait, otherwise we would share this Vulture's mum's intuition.

http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Brasil/foto/0,,15345660-EX,00.jpg http://www.patuca.blogger.com.br/Cosan-005.jpg

In the case of human evaluators of babies, not only our genetic proximity to the baby must be taken in consideration.

Human females pupils dilate (signal of attraction) when seeing a baby. Human male pupils will vary, with the case being that childless man are more likely to get a shrinkage, while fathers mostly have dilated pupils.

Sometimes it pays not to detect something, evolutionarily speaking, some levels of egoism are tolerated and forgotten to keep future altruism, for instance. Females are pro-babies in general probably because it would be too costly to find other babies neutral, or ugly. The male scenario is a bit different.

Also, we see babies all the time, so we should beware of Contrast Effect bias in favor of the bunny.

Comment author: Sticky 22 February 2010 06:04:44PM 7 points [-]

We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general -- so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 February 2010 09:00:36AM 7 points [-]

Our sense of cuteness may be tuned to respond optimally to young children, instead of newborns. (I'm guessing here based on the fact that humans look like young children for a much longer period of time than like newborns. My personal sense of cuteness is extremely insensitive for some reason.)

What causes the cuteness response? Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable? Why are babies, well, pretty cute? I don't know - but I'm pretty sure it's not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn't want me to nurture bunnies.

I'm not convinced that you should be "pretty sure", but I'm more interested in why you used the word "cheap". What does that mean in this context?

Comment author: Kutta 23 February 2010 11:23:06AM *  1 point [-]

Our sense of cuteness may be tuned to respond optimally to young children, instead of newborns.

Mortality among ancestral newborns were rampant so caring for them was probably of less marginal utility than caring for young children, I think.

Comment author: ResistTheUrge 22 February 2010 11:00:06PM 1 point [-]

My "cuteness sense" responds that way. I find young children (2 - 4 years old) much cuter than newborns. I don't think I'm alone in this.

Comment author: mattnewport 23 February 2010 12:22:58AM 5 points [-]

Young animals don't generally reach optimal cuteness until some time after birth. Given the slower rate at which human young mature relative to other animals your cuteness sense for humans is not necessarily inconsistent with the normal response to animals. It seems to me that the pictures used for comparison in the OP use a bunny at a relatively later stage of development than the human infant.

Newborn puppies, kittens and rabbits are peculiar little blind wriggling things and are less cute than slightly older young animals. Newborn rabbits appear to be hairless.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 05:49:13PM 1 point [-]

"Cheap" means the one you come up with if you think about the question "Why are babies cute?" instead of "Why are the things that are cute as cute as they are?"

Comment author: jimrandomh 22 February 2010 02:40:59AM 7 points [-]

Perhaps the cuteness response is tied to domestication - ie, evolution wants us to take the bunny with us until it gets old enough to stop being cute, and then eat it.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 22 February 2010 11:38:33AM 3 points [-]

Then it fails again. People get attached to pets. They tend not to eat them, even if they're edible.

Comment author: prase 22 February 2010 05:56:51PM *  4 points [-]

Not during famines. We can afford to have pets, but if you are an often hungry member of a hunter-gatherer tribe, cuteness may be a good measure to compensate your desire to eat the bunny on the spot.

Also, we don't eat all domestic animals. Dogs or horses are quite important examples.

Comment author: JohannesDahlstrom 22 February 2010 06:19:06PM *  8 points [-]

We don't, for some memetic reason, I guess, but many cultures do. New evidence suggest that dogs were actually first domesticated for livestock purposes (but see also this).

Incidentally, returning from the South Pole, Amundsen and his team did slaughter their dogs one at a time, as they had planned to do from the beginning, and used them for feeding both themselves and the remaining dogs. Scott's expedition considered killing their trusty companions immoral (not to mention ungentlemanly), a stance that ultimately cost the lives of both the humans and their dogs.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 22 October 2012 02:03:21AM 1 point [-]

Is there any clear evidence for a single origin of domesticated dogs? Given that dogs can be bred with wolves, I see no reason why what we have now couldn't be a mix of the results of multiple domestication events.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 October 2012 03:52:27PM *  1 point [-]

Taking a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog , it seems that wolves were domesticated several times but all extant dogs are descended (at least matrilineally) from those domesticated around 15,000 years ago in China.

Comment author: thomblake 22 February 2010 06:25:35PM 3 points [-]

Also, we don't eat all domestic animals. Dogs or horses are quite important examples.

horse meat

dog meat

I was very grossed out by a little shop advertising "Carni Equine" in Mantova, but apparently the locals did not feel the same, as it was on several restaurants' menus.

Comment author: JohannesDahlstrom 22 February 2010 06:56:04PM 2 points [-]

Thin slices of Mettwurst, made at least partially of equine meat, are quite a popular sandwich filling in most of Central and Northern Europe. It's not uncommon for adolescent boys to tease their (usually female) horse-aficionado peers with jokes built around this fact.

(Incidentally, horse meat is apparently very high quality - high-protein, low-fat. And of course, equines - gazelles and others - were an important part of our ancestors' cuisine.)

Comment author: pjeby 22 February 2010 07:40:48PM 5 points [-]

Incidentally, horse meat is apparently very high quality - high-protein, low-fat.

What do "low fat" and "high quality" have to do with one another?

Comment author: JohannesDahlstrom 22 February 2010 08:24:08PM 4 points [-]

Point conceded; I wrote hastily. It does seem, though, that horse meat has quite favorable cholesterol values and an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 02:53:36PM 6 points [-]

Actually, I find the baby about 75 000 cuter. This might have something to do with the fact that I'm a) a girl, and b) right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids. I see babies in the street and get warm fuzzy feelings. My (female) friends and I at work talk about how much we want to take home every baby in the Parent & Tot swimming classes. We show each other pictures of friends' babies and go completely gaga. Just wanted to point out that this may be something that varies with sex. (Although not for everyone, of course.)

Comment author: Alicorn 12 March 2011 03:43:20PM 4 points [-]

I'm a girl too, and I'm 22 (was 21 when I wrote the article) - I'm not sure if you categorize that as the biological age where I should be having babies, but it's not just a sex thing, although that might factor in weakly somehow.

Comment author: rabidchicken 12 March 2011 08:43:25PM 4 points [-]

Trying to determine what effect if any sex has is difficult, because the reaction of males / females to young children is highly influenced by exposure. Anecdotally, when families I know have had children, any girls who have some relation to the family are often encouraged to play with them / babysit them, or are given tutorials on things like changing diapers. I can only think of one guy who had the same treatment, although males may also just try to hide that they are good at dealing with babies. I have worked in a nursery with children around age 5 and up, and this is when it actually becomes possible for me to find them cute, I don't think its a coincidence.

Instead of getting taught from an early age, the general trend seems to be that men are just expected to pick it up on the spot when they get married. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and may account for the large number of guys who worry about commitment in the first place. When I hold a baby, I feel the same as i did when I first started playing an expensive instrument, or installed an OS on my computer, paranoid because I was worried I was going to break something. If it wasn't for that, then the odds of me finding babies cute would go up considerably.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 03:42:55AM 1 point [-]

I'm trans (assigned male at birth, female now) and can say that there's not the same kind of pressure on young men to react well to babies and young children and take an interest in them. I happen to have a fairly strong caretaker/teacher/playful interaction drive where kids are concerned; it was often seen as a bit weird, although once people saw me establishing a rapport with a child, they'd usually re-sort me into the "exception" box.

Comment author: DSimon 14 March 2011 01:19:33PM 5 points [-]

To the baby picture, my response is "aw, that's cute".

When I saw that bunny picture, my entire face scrunched with joy up for a good 15 seconds, no exaggeration. My hands rose to my face and covered my cheeks in the "Home Alone" configuration, although my expression was I'm quite sure one of joy rather than fear. I had to employ a fair amount of willpower to stop myself from saying "D'awwwww" out loud.

Consider me a data point in favor of your counter-hypothesis.

Comment author: HughRistik 22 February 2010 07:41:06PM 5 points [-]

The fact that some humans who find baby animals cute often treat them like babies, refer to their pets as "my babies," and engage in baby-talk to them is consistent with the notion that considering these animals cute is merely a byproduct of human baby-perception. I think part of the reason that Alicorn's baby bunny is so cute is that it is holding up its arms, like a baby wanting to be picked up.

Comment author: Cyan 22 February 2010 02:38:54AM 5 points [-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

You're wrong. That baby is way cuter than the bunny.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 February 2010 02:53:41AM 4 points [-]

For people with cutoffs for low karma comments: Poll on relative cuteness of babies and bunnies - karma balance.

Comment author: Nominull 25 February 2010 09:09:19PM 4 points [-]

problem with the poll: the karma changes have left me several hundred karma points in the red to downvote anything.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 03:27:26AM 4 points [-]

The problem with popularity: I've just been searching the web hoping to find someone linking to an investigation into cuteness that delved a bit deeper than spouting 'just so' stories. What I found is that not only are the most prominent results LessWrong.com links, most of the next in line links are external responses on the topic that link here.

Comment author: FrankAdamek 22 February 2010 03:33:35PM 4 points [-]

I regret not having the time to read all the comments before class, but, in addition to our culture which does anthropomorphize wee bitty aminals, we don't have the acquired distaste or taste for eating or repelling rabbits.

My mother is a gardner, likes puppies, kittens, etc, and hates rabbits. She's said a person will find them cute until they keep ripping up your flower bed.

It seems plausible that having been starving and relieved by rabbit meat a few times, a person would think "Yum!" upon seeing a rabbit.

Perhaps our cute instinct is slightly misaimed, we lack most of the normal associations we would gain from these animals, and in reverse have gained large associations in the other direction, exploding a slight evolutionary mistake. Common kids shows might have more difficulty in making babies super cute, being that some of their audience are infants themselves. Then they'd feature adorable, wittle bittle..."you"s?

Comment author: CannibalSmith 22 February 2010 12:06:15PM *  4 points [-]

Hey, let's play a game! Pick any comment in this comment tree and reply to it with a picture you consider cuter than it. The markup is ![](http://www.blabla.com/picutre.jpg) . Please do not reply to yourself. One picture per post please.

I'll start with the first Google Images result for "cute":

Comment author: Kutta 24 February 2010 02:11:09PM *  8 points [-]

I'm appalled that Less Wrong came to have a "Post cute kittens" thread this soon. Still, I wouldn't call it an unfortunate turn of events.

Comment author: CronoDAS 25 February 2010 10:55:57PM 5 points [-]

As an Internet forum grows older, the probability of a thread devoted to posting pictures of cute kittens approaches one. ;)

Comment author: Kevin 26 February 2010 11:22:40AM *  1 point [-]

I will bet 500 karma (1:1, terms fully negotiable) that there will be a "funny picture" thread within one year.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2010 12:26:21AM 4 points [-]

Comment author: CannibalSmith 23 February 2010 09:55:36AM 1 point [-]

Comment author: Kevin 23 February 2010 01:19:09PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: ciphergoth 23 February 2010 02:08:15PM 4 points [-]

STOP STOP! I die!

Comment author: ata 23 February 2010 02:20:43PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: ata 23 February 2010 02:19:53PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: Unnamed 22 February 2010 07:10:53AM *  4 points [-]

I believe that Konrad Lorenz was the first one to advance the evolutionary theory of cuteness. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article about it (pdf) using Mickey Mouse as an example (don't be dissuaded by the author's identity). Lorenz argued that we respond with awwwws and nurturing behavior to features that distinguish infant humans from adults, like large round heads, large eyes, small pudgy limbs, and clumsy movements, even if they belong to another animal or a nonliving thing.

There has been research on why animals are cute, again going back to Lorenz, and I think it's generally accepted that the young of many species are cute to us because they share cute-inducing features that are common to that developmental stage, some species (like pandas) seem cute just because out of the wide variety of species some of them happen to have cute-inducing features, and some species (like dogs) seem cute because humans have bred them that way. I'm not sure if there is research on whether adults of other species find their own young to be cute.

Human infants are unusually helpless for an unusually long period of time, which helps explain why humans are so attuned to cuteness (and why there would be a bias towards over-identifying instances of cuteness, which evolutionarily is the less costly error). That doesn't explain why bunnies are cuter than babies, though, or why non-humans dominate the top of our cutest list. Perhaps they just have more of the cute-inducing features. Humans occupy a small portion of body-space, and if you move from the region occupied by adult humans to the region occupied by human infants and then go even further along the same dimensions, you could run into regions occupied by other animals. But why would this happen for cuteness but not sexiness?

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 07:35:56AM *  5 points [-]

and some species (like dogs) seem cute because humans have bred them that way.

I have heard it said that in general dogs seem cute because they bred themselves to exploit us more so than us breeding them. Actual breeding came somewhat later on.

Comment author: Unnamed 22 February 2010 05:01:04PM 2 points [-]

You're right - I should've said "selected" instead of "bred" - they became cuter under selection pressure from humans.

Comment author: Unnamed 22 February 2010 08:07:10PM 3 points [-]

This is a rewrite of my comment as more of an argument and less links and speculation, since I think that parts of it might be clearer that way.

Lorenz's theory is that humans evolved to respond with an awwww to the features that distinguish infants from adults, and so we also awwww to other animals that have those features. Why do other species have features that we find cute? One reason is that we've exerted selection pressure on them - for instance, by being more friendly to cuter wolf/dogs. A second is that features common among mammal young naturally became features of human babies, so of course other baby animals have some cute-inducing features. A third is that features that differ between babies and adults also tend to differ between different species, and so there will be some species that have the baby-like version of those features or even a more extreme version. Babies are smaller than adults but some species are smaller; babies have small less-protruding noses but some species have smaller noses; babies have small limbs relative to their body but other species have smaller ones; babies are soft but some species are softer.

Bunny superiority may just be a result of there being enough species so that some will have a large enough collection of extreme cute-inducing features to be super-adorable. And since our ancestors don't seem to have wasted a ton of fitness on cute non-humans, they didn't undergo a strong evolutionary force to prevent the bunny takeover.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 03:52:20AM 4 points [-]

1) The baby is far cuter than the rabbit.

2) There's nothing wrong with a stimulus having a superstimulus.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 05:16:06AM 16 points [-]

Superstimuli are typically artificial. I don't have this problem with Dennett's explanation of the sweet tooth just because cake exists - the cake is explained. And I wouldn't be complaining about the cuteness explanation if the only thing cuter than the baby were an idealized drawing of a baby.

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 06:06:32AM 5 points [-]

Given 5000 species of mammals in the world that are guaranteed to have a number of facial features in common with humans and a number of developmental similarities, shouldn't some happen to super-stimulate our cuteness sense just by chance?

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 12:15:44PM *  6 points [-]

That looks like just the evo-psych kind of reasoning Alicorn is warning against.

Compare: given 5000 species of mammals that are guaranteed to have many physical features in common with humans, shouldn't some happen to super-stimulate our sexual attraction just by chance? Why would mating choice be that much more strongly selected than baby nurturing behavior?

ETA: some good explanations for this difference have been proposed in the comments below:

  1. Only mating choice is subject to sexual selection, which is a powerful force. (Eliezer)
  2. Animals aren't deliberately trying to appear cute. But other humans are always trying to appear sexy. Therefore our sexual choice heuristics evolved to better eliminate false positives. (Me)
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:10:28PM 8 points [-]

Actually, it makes perfect sense for sexual selection on sexual-attractiveness-features to be subject to far greater selection pressure and fine-tuning than baby-cuteness.

I'll make a testable prediction here: Cases of parental superstimulus (like baby ducks following a stick figure, infant monkeys getting attached to puppets, etc., if I'm remembering correctly) ought to be far more common / easier to fake than sexual superstimulus. I'll limit the key part of the prediction to complex vertebrates so that they have large enough brains to be complicated, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the rule more universal than that.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 06:46:34AM 6 points [-]

Lots of them superstimulate compared to human babies. It doesn't seem very coincidental to me. There are even birds that are cuter than human babies.

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 12:13:15PM *  1 point [-]

This doesn't rule out the baby hypothesis (although I don't accept it as the best one, myself). The important thing is that we do consider babies somewhat cute. By the hypothesis, if babies weren't cute at all (if everyone recognized how ugly they are), adults would care for them less. If true, this would be a beneficial instinct despite the attention wasted on cute animals.

Since evolutionary adaptations are selected from chance mutations to begin with, it's not unreasonable for one to have mildly negative side effects. Can someone weigh in on how numerically probable it is that evolution hadn't improved this instinct further, to only work on babies, if we assume it has existed for X millions of years? We need hard numbers...

Comment author: taw 22 February 2010 01:40:45PM 4 points [-]

The important thing is that we do consider babies somewhat cute.

I don't find babies cute at all - the shitting crying obnoxious variety which really exists is strongly anti-cute.

On the other hand I haven't met a single person yet who wouldn't go awwwwww when interacting with my cat.

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 03:54:29PM *  2 points [-]

I wonder if we don't repress thinking that babies are cute to some extent. Before I had one, I never thought babies were cute. I just thought: eww, work! or, eww, delayed career plans! They represent responsibility, which isn't cute. (Similar to contents of this thread.)

But if you were walking in a forest and just happened to find a baby. If you didn't know it was a human baby, with various obligations and long-term ties, wouldn't you want to pick it up and snuggle it? Or not?

I'll also add here, though it could be added other places, that I don't know if most parents think newborns are cute. (I actually have a theory that children are born a few weeks earlier than evolution long-term conditioned us for.) Children are maximally cute somewhere between 6 months and 3 years and each parent differs in exactly when and why.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:13:56PM 7 points [-]

But if you were walking in a forest and just happened to find a baby. If you didn't know it was a human baby, with various obligations and long-term ties, wouldn't you want to pick it up and snuggle it? Or not?

Unless the baby is likely to be a relative, isn't this actually vastly less adaptive behavior than picking up a cute bunny rabbit that you can eat later in times of famine?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 22 February 2010 07:33:42PM *  4 points [-]

I wouldn't use "superstimulus" to describe a bunny being merely cuter than a baby, but I would for a cuckoo too big for the nest, yet still being fed by the host. This is the result of an optimization process, though not an artificial one.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 07:39:20PM 4 points [-]

It's in cuckoo interests to be attractive to host birds; it's not obviously serving non-domesticated animals to be cute. It hasn't historically stopped us from eating them at anywhere near the rates that would put that kind of pressure on.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:15:27PM 2 points [-]

How does the same cuckoo manage to be attractive to so many host birds?

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 08:10:12PM 1 point [-]

it's not obviously serving non-domesticated animals to be cute. It hasn't historically stopped us from eating them at anywhere near the rates that would put that kind of pressure on.

If so, then it also doesn't significantly harm humans to see animals as cute (since it doesn't make us give up a source of food). If this is so, then a much weaker justification might be accepted for the source of cuteness, perhaps as weak as "side effect of phenotypically unrelated evolution".

Comment author: Cyan 22 February 2010 09:27:45PM *  3 points [-]

Can't find the citation now, but at least some of the reason that host birds feed baby cuckoos is that parent cuckoos monitor how well their offspring are doing and will destroy the nests of birds that fail to feed the cuckoo chick. So there's selective pressure to respond to the cuckoo chick's stimulus without it necessarily being a superstimulus.

Comment author: knb 24 February 2010 01:28:14AM 1 point [-]

There isn't strong evidence of this.

~Bird Dork.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 22 February 2010 10:06:58PM *  1 point [-]

I saw that hypothesis when I was looking for the picture, but it doesn't apply to the particular picture, where the cuckoo is the only chick in the nest, in fact, too big for even the mother to perch on the rim. That was way beyond the pictures I'd seen before, where the cuckoo is merely bigger than the mother. Actually, the picture doesn't make sense me: how can the mother provide enough food for this gigantic chick, much bigger than her whole brood?

Comment author: CronoDAS 23 February 2010 03:20:58PM 1 point [-]

Maybe that's not the mother. Some birds will feed cuckoos in nests not their own.

Comment author: billswift 22 February 2010 07:28:01AM 3 points [-]

Where do you get this - "Superstimuli are typically artificial"?

Comment author: wnoise 22 February 2010 08:16:09AM *  9 points [-]

Superstimuli are typically not found in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (or else the executions that latched on to them inappropriately would tend to decrease in frequency through the population). Although humans have spread to habitats outside Africa, the largest changes since then have been ones humans have made -- i.e. "artificial".

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 February 2010 08:47:19AM *  6 points [-]

That is a reasonable explanation. (I don't know why you were downvoted, and voted you back up to 0.)

But theoretically, it's possible to have a superstimulus for cuteness that existed in our EEA, if the maladaptive behavior that would be triggered by it is more easily prevented by a cultural norm or another adaptation, instead of by tuning down our cuteness sense for it.

Comment author: Clippy 22 February 2010 12:05:21PM 11 points [-]

This is far cuter than all of them put together.

Comment author: Jack 23 February 2010 02:20:16AM *  6 points [-]

But how do you feel about these?

Comment author: Clippy 23 February 2010 02:39:12AM 3 points [-]

Those aren't nearly as cute. They have that ugly shape on them that doesn't contribute to paperclip functionality. You could clip that part off and make a second clip for each one of them, given all that they waste.

So, not so much "nurturing" behavior induced.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:15:54PM 4 points [-]

What sort of nurturing behavior do you feel compelled to exhibit toward paperclips? Now I'm curious.

Comment author: Clippy 23 February 2010 01:25:22AM 6 points [-]

Well, I want to protect them and keep them in a safe place so that other processes in the universe don't convert them into ugly non-paperclip forms. Just looking at that thing makes me want to envelop it within the safe zone!

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 22 February 2010 02:14:19AM *  4 points [-]

IAWYC, but I wonder how human-universal the cuteness response to bunnies is (constantly being told "these are cute!" might increase it in our culture). I also wonder how many animals look cute that would have been likely prey in the African EEA.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 02:16:59AM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure what all critters people ate in the African ancestral environment, but I'd be really, really surprised if none of them were cute, at least as juveniles. (Which are easier to catch than healthy adults.)

Comment author: knb 24 February 2010 02:25:08AM *  3 points [-]

So what is the alternative explanation for cuteness? Cuteness is a universal response that is very similar in all human beings. People all over the world find the same things cute. Did the phenomenon of cuteness just emerge, culturally, ex nihilo, and spread to every country in which the subject has been studied?

This universal human phenomenon must be explained somehow. The only explanation is that the phenomenon of cuteness is an evolved response.

And, I can't emphasize this enough, Dennett's hypothesis might have been idle speculation, but this issue has been thoroughly studied by psychologists and neouroscientists.

http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/bps/article/S0006-3223%2807%2900482-9/abstract

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200803/cute-the-brain

The theory of cuteness as evolved psychological adaptation is supported by mountains of empirical evidence, by reason, and by evolutionary theory.

My evolutionary psychology professor just discussed cuteness in some detail a few weeks ago. She was very convincing. I have absolutely no idea how you consider all of this to be "cheaply wrong".

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 02:26:25AM 5 points [-]

I'm sure there is an evolutionary explanation for cuteness. I just don't think it's this one.

Comment author: pwno 22 February 2010 09:50:10PM 3 points [-]

Another interesting thought: Animals probably find human babies cute too.

Comment author: SilasBarta 22 February 2010 09:57:12PM 2 points [-]

Maybe so. I've heard anecdotal stories about female cats that have had baby kittens, and then take an interest when their owners had a newborn, becoming very protective of the (human) baby.

Comment author: lavalamp 22 February 2010 03:53:11PM 3 points [-]

Some potential confounding factors to consider:

  • Society spends the first 18 years of kid's live's teaching them how and why not to have babies (not complaining, just pointing out that it could affect one's cuteness judgments).

  • Your cuteness detector might very well be tied to detecting your own genetic material. IOW, you might find your own babies very cute, and those of others, not so cute. (My parents claim that this is the case, I wouldn't know.) And you, being female, would have a very good idea of what babies are genetically yours...

Comment author: taw 22 February 2010 01:53:35PM 3 points [-]
Comment author: NancyLebovitz 22 February 2010 03:46:53PM *  2 points [-]

The site includes the cutest images. The cuteness response can be set off strongly by a cute creature associating with human stuff or (just a few of them) seeming to do a distinctively human gesture. Any theories about what's going on there?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:27:29PM 3 points [-]

Also, Alicorn's image found on a Google search is the cutest image on the top of TheCutest.Info. No matter how she found the image to begin with, this seems like highly relevant data! Even a search procedure that seems fair can manage to turn up an unfair point of comparison.

Albeit some of the other images in the top 40 seemed far cuter than that to me - cuter than babies. Maybe I just don't like bunnies? How could evolutionary psychology explain that?

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 09:01:20PM *  2 points [-]

"Allison"?

My name is not Allison. "Alicorn" is not my real name, related to my real name, derived from my real name, similar to my real name, or otherwise indicative on any level of my real name.

Even if it were, I prefer not to disseminate my real name in most online contexts. For this reason SIAI-house-inhabiting persons have continued to refer to me as Alicorn, to avoid leakage of their knowledge of my real name. So even if you knew my real name, you should not use it.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 09:48:30PM 6 points [-]

I initially commented to the above effect that it was just a random brain-bleep and I did not remember your True Name if indeed I had ever been told it, but then deleted the comment, since if I had known your name to be Allison and genuinely slipped up, I would want to be the sort of person who simply wouldn't say whether or not it was a revealing slip-up, one way or the other, so as to maintain Plausible Deniability. To put it another way, if it had been your real name, I would want to be able to truthfully say, "Whether it was her real name or just a brain-cache substitution, I would not confirm or deny it one way or the other, so you cannot take any evidence from the fact that I am being apparently evasive." This requires that I say the same thing whether your name is Allison or not, since otherwise people can take Bayesian evidence from it. However since in this case you have already commented to this effect, I suppose I might as well confirm it.

I did once know an Allison and my brain seems to repeatedly substitute that name for yours. I usually catch it before commenting, but not this time. There are other bizarre things my brain does along the same lines, for example, I simply cannot remember, even after having been told a dozen times or more, whether Peter Thiel's last name is pronounced Thee-el or Tee-el.

Comment author: SilasBarta 22 February 2010 09:51:55PM 1 point [-]

I apologize to all for making such a big issue about the typo. (I removed the flamebaitish part of my earlier comment.)

Comment author: komponisto 22 February 2010 10:05:15PM 5 points [-]

For my part, my brain automatically interprets your pseudonym as a portmanteau of "Allison" and "unicorn", and there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it. (Not that I would be any more tempted to refer to you as "Allison" than I would be to refer to you as "Unicorn", of course.)

Comment author: bgrah449 22 February 2010 09:11:32PM 1 point [-]

Her real name is Carmen Sandiego.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 09:12:18PM 4 points [-]

It can't be, because I'm willing to reveal my location relative to the Earth.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:19:55PM 3 points [-]

It might be an awful experiment to perform, but if we can find a parent with a newborn child and sufficient self-honesty to be trustworthy, we can ask them whether or not, in all honesty, their own baby is cuter than those images, which were cute enough to make my head explode into candy.

If a trustworthy self-honest rationalist parent looks at that and says "yes, my baby is cuter"... I'd have to say that explains a lot about parents and a lot about the continued survival of the human species.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 22 February 2010 08:31:44PM 2 points [-]

What would be even more interesting would be to do a time-series. When do human infants have peak cuteness?

Comment author: TomM 15 March 2011 05:02:21AM 4 points [-]

As a fairly observant and (as far as I can tell) realistic parent, I have noticed that both of my children have (up to their current ages of four years and 19 months) had several peak periods for cuteness. So far they have had peaks centred at the same ages: 5 months, 15 months and (oldest only so far) 3 years.

This is not to say that they are not cute at any other ages, but at these ages they have been radiantly, eye-wateringly cute.

Comment author: k3nt 23 February 2010 03:10:40AM 1 point [-]

My baby boy was at or near the top of all the images for cuteness for about 1 year. Or I would have said so at the time.

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 09:57:57PM *  1 point [-]

Looking through those pictures, I get cuted-out, and want to go find that site about bunny suicides.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 05:34:32PM 1 point [-]

I think that may have the effect of crosswiring with the funniness reaction, although I can't access introspective data on the subject because I generally prefer my cute animal pictures to be devoid of humans and human artifacts.

Comment author: Leafy 22 February 2010 01:47:49PM 3 points [-]

Is it not worth considering "cuteness" to be defined in terms of threat levels. It seems to me that in most cases there is a direct correlation between cuteness and perceived threat.

By threat I am referring not just to physical (claws versus soft paws, large vs small, dominant versus meek, hard versus soft) but even biological (messy / unhygenic looking creatures versus fluffy / cuddly looking ones) or social (flawed versus flawless).

This may explain why some people perceive cuteness differently. One person may look at a human baby and see no possible threat, others may be more inclined to be considering health implications or even the threat of embaressment / fear it is associated with.

With this association in mind it would seem that selection towards lower threat is prevalent - babies looking cute leads to lower abandonment or attack by other parties, animals allowed to come close to humans without fear and benefiting from shelter / food / care etc.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 22 February 2010 02:23:28PM 5 points [-]

This also might explain why some of us think that babies are cute, and others of us don't: Not that babies themselves are potentially dangerous, but that messing with someone else's baby is potentially dangerous, particularly if the baby belongs to someone who's not a tribemate. I suspect that finding a given baby cute correlates with how much we trust the baby's parents; in the case of strangers' babies, it would correlate with our priors regarding how dangerous it is to interact with strangers.

This doesn't explain why some stranger's babies register as cuter than others, though - perhaps that correlates with how much the babies look like people who we believe would trust us to interact with their babies?

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 01:59:48PM 3 points [-]

Cats are dangerous predators and many housecats scratch or bite humans in play, but they're still cute, often in the very moment of doing so. They can also appear cute when hunting real prey.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 22 February 2010 02:10:01PM 2 points [-]

Cats that are actually dangerous to us are generally not perceived as cute, though. Googling 'cute lion', for example, turns up primarily cubs, drawings of cubs, drawings of adults with cublike proportions (which look decidedly nonthreatening), or babies or pets dressed up to look like lions. The only picture of an actual adult lion on the first 5 pages that registers as even remotely cute is this one, and that stops registering as cute at all when I consider the chance that that lion could have mauled her.

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 02:17:47PM 1 point [-]

I see this as saying that fear masks cuteness.

It makes sense that immediate physical fear overrides cuteness-attraction. But if fear is banished, the same animals - even adult felines - appear cute (to me, at least). For instance, if I had a bionic body that a lion couldn't maul, I strongly believe I'd find that lion kiss picture very cute and would very much want to play with big cats.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 22 February 2010 02:32:00PM 1 point [-]

That's how I parsed the original comment's 'threat levels' - it's not that we're hardwired to see certain things as nonthreatening and thus cute; the perception of threat is learned or situational, and cuteness is the opposite perception, and thus also learned or situational.

(I'd want to play with big cats in that situation, too. Have you seen the videos of the guy who does? They're adorable.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 22 February 2010 03:55:29PM 2 points [-]

It can't just be harmlessness-- all sorts of things (like pencils) are harmless but not cute.

Comment author: CronoDAS 22 February 2010 03:18:24AM 3 points [-]

Cats are cuter than bunnies.

Comment author: CannibalSmith 22 February 2010 11:52:14AM 1 point [-]

Catgirls are cuter than cats.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:07:12PM 12 points [-]

Male tentacle monsters perceive Japanese schoolgirls as a superstimulus relative to female tentacle monsters. It probably has something to do with the tie on the sailor uniforms.

Comment author: CronoDAS 23 February 2010 04:20:10AM 3 points [-]

What does a female tentacle monster look like, anyway? And do they like human males?

Comment author: arundelo 22 February 2010 12:21:51PM 7 points [-]

I think that's a different meaning of "cute".

Comment author: Leonhart 22 February 2010 08:03:01PM 2 points [-]

Do you think the two meanings of cute are mutally exclusive? In me they're mutually reinforcing, at least some of the time.

Comment author: arundelo 23 February 2010 05:03:41AM 1 point [-]

I was mainly being cheeky, but I don't think I have ever experienced them at the same time.

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 10:35:43PM 2 points [-]

Yeah, that's really odd. Personally I have no awwwww response to human babies - in fact they actually disgust me a little - but I do have an awwwww response to human children and a sometimes-sexualized awwww response to some adult humans. In all cases my awwwww response is opposed to (although it can coexist with) an awe response.

It was mentioned that people are socialized to find bunnies cute, but I think that looking at gender differences in the same culture might reveal something since I don't think men are socialized that strongly.

Comment author: TuviaDulin 25 October 2012 08:47:25AM 2 points [-]

This may not be the best place to ask, but is Evolutionary Psychology actually falsifiable?

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 10:19:35PM 1 point [-]

Probably depends on what you mean. It does make predictions, but it is very difficult to get away from what is already known.

Comment author: alexflint 23 February 2010 12:12:19PM *  2 points [-]

It would be surprising if we found all babies cute because most babies do not carry our genes. Even a simplistic application of evo-psych would predict that we'd find our own babies very cute, while we'd be unmoved or even disgusted by others' babies.

Whether this is actually the case is a matter for careful experimentation and analysis, however. Evolution as a theory is not sufficiently precise to reliably make such detailed predictions (I believe this was Alicorn's original point)

Comment author: fmuaddib 23 February 2010 03:52:59PM 3 points [-]

In fact non social species, like felines, are unmoved or even aggressive toward babies not kin related to them.

But we are primates, and being primates very social, we are subject to trivers reciprocal altruism, in other words: childs are very prone to help strangers if they feeds them. They can be adopted and parassitated as muscular force in exchange of a small piece of the meal, smaller than those of the natural childs of course, as foster care studies have demonstrated. So we can find others child very attractive too, because they can be very useful to us, because they are easily exploited due to the long period of dependence from adults.

This is not directly related to the cutness, anyway, that is a physical trait, with specific characteristics (big facial elements, head bigger than the body, small arms, etc.). If one puppy develops those traits to deceive his parents, those traits will be there to be seen by all the other people too. Unless there is a specific adaptation to resist such aestetic feedback in non kin related puppies, like in some non-social species, the brain response at a cute face is the same.

Comment author: wnoise 23 February 2010 07:08:47PM 2 points [-]

All babies carry the vast majority of our genes. We're extremely related to all other humans -- the complication is that they're also our most relevant competition. Tiny fractions of a percent differ between one person's kids and their neighbors. Nonetheless, these are the genes we're geared to care about.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 08:52:24PM 1 point [-]

There is a name for that. The thing we mean when we say 'the child shares 50% of its genes with its father' when it actually shares nearly all of them. A word for the particular difference from the base gene pool that a genetic source gives. It fit perfectly but I just can't remember it. Any ideas?

Comment author: scotherns 26 February 2010 08:34:04AM 1 point [-]

Allele?

Comment author: wnoise 26 February 2010 09:50:18AM 3 points [-]

No, "allele" is not the word we want, though we should be using it in preference to "gene". "Allele" just means "a particular variant of a gene". Technically speaking, "gene" means all the ways of coding for some particular set of structures (or rather the proteins that end up constructing them, or otherwise affect development). For example, humans have two primary genes for blood type. The first gene determines the Rh factor, with one allele of that gene coding for positive Rh, and the other for negative Rh. The second gene determines the ABO encoding, with one allele coding for O, a second for A, and a third for B. And of course, the alleles on each copy of the gene combine to produce different phenotypes, which can often be simplified to the "dominant recessive" model when there are only two common alleles in a population (e.g. Rh). ABO typing is more complicated -- A and B refer to types of "antigens" (surface markers) that your blood cells may have. Each is produced if you have at least one allele of that type. O, in contrast produces no antigens. (There are actually a whole passel of other genes that code for existence of a whole lot of other antigens and typing factors, but the variants are a lot rarer, so most people don't need to worry about them.)

The term wedifrid is asking for (and that I would really like to have) is about the frequencies of alleles. There is casual talk of someone's son being 50% related to his father. Certainly exactly 50% of his alleles were copied from his father. On the other hand, we should say that he's also 50% related to his father's identical twin brother, where there is no direct copying -- just the happenstance that this set of 50% of alleles is identical to that of his father's identical twin. But, as it turns out, of the 50% of genes that weren't copied, a very very high proportion will be the same as in his father (or indeed his uncle).

A natural distance to define on these sets of alleles is the l_1 distance "how many are different". (we can choose this on the level of DNA letters, codons, codons with equivalents lumped together, or "expresses same protein"; and measure slightly different things). For most genes there is effectively only one allele, so this measure of similarity doesn't go from 0% to 100%. Instead, it varies in a tiny fraction of 1% around 100%. If we do want it to be able to drop down to 0%, then we shouldn't count those genes with only one allele. How about genes with two alleles, but one is extremely rare? Perhaps entropy of each gene would be a reasonable weighting. Just counting "is there a path of descent to a common ancestor" certainly won't let us stretch the scale out to 0% either, because in that sense we're all heavily related. We want some (hopefully mathematically formalizable) sense of "this guy's deviance from the human average overlaps by x% with this other guy's deviance from the human average". Or at least a more precise word for that, rather than just talking about shared gene (allele) percentages, which will be extremely close to 100%.

Comment author: MatthewB 23 February 2010 11:03:21AM 2 points [-]

I have a very adverse reaction to human babies... I want to pop them. Or something similar. They look like you could just stick a big pin in them and they'd go POP.

Bunnies are way cuter than human babies (at least to humans I think).

Comment author: brazil84 22 February 2010 02:11:52PM 2 points [-]

Fundamentally, aren't you asking why furry mammals are cuter than non-furry mammals?

Comment author: DanArmak 22 February 2010 02:25:29PM 1 point [-]

That's not the only determinant of cuteness.

For instance, kittens also purr, mew, play-hunt, rub themselves against people, and lick people. All of which are cute, attractive behaviors that babies lack.

Comment author: brazil84 22 February 2010 02:36:02PM 1 point [-]

To me, a baby's babbling is a lot cuter than purring or mewing. And to me, a baby grabbing at something with its tiny hands is a lot cuter than play-hunting, rubbing, or licking.

So for me, the real conundrum is fur. As far as I can tell.

But I admit that this is based on introspection and I'm assuming that my own cuteness standard is somewhat universal.

Comment author: HughRistik 22 February 2010 07:27:35PM 2 points [-]

To me, a baby's babbling is a lot cuter than purring or mewing. And to me, a baby grabbing at something with its tiny hands is a lot cuter than play-hunting, rubbing, or licking.

Same here.

So for me, the real conundrum is fur. As far as I can tell.

Our ancestors were furrier, so we might have evolutionary baggage leading us to find furriness cute. As long as this baggage didn't hurt human reproductive success, there would be no reason for it to disappear.

Comment author: brazil84 22 February 2010 07:50:19PM 1 point [-]

Our ancestors were furrier, so we might have evolutionary baggage leading us to find furriness cute. As long as this baggage didn't hurt human reproductive success, there would be no reason for it to disappear.

I think this is the best explanation, but I have to admit it doesn't satisfy me 100%. Logically it seems to me that have the cute instinct triggered by a furry creature must hurt human reproductive success at least a tiny amount. Over a long time, this arguably should have a big impact.

Comment author: HughRistik 22 February 2010 08:19:42PM 1 point [-]

I think this is the best explanation, but I have to admit it doesn't satisfy me 100%. Logically it seems to me that have the cute instinct triggered by a furry creature must hurt human reproductive success at least a tiny amount.

Well, maybe. But I would want to see some actual historical accounts or folktales of humans getting sidetracked by cute animals recently enough in our evolutionary history to matter. In the EEA, the availability of cute animals as pets would have been a lot lower than it was today. And trying to get a wild animal as a pet would've been harder. When you couple those facts with social norms towards reproducing, people failing to mate or take care of their kids due to being distracted by cute animals seems less and less likely.

Comment author: MBlume 22 February 2010 04:56:51AM 2 points [-]

These babies are soooo much cuter than your bunny.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 05:27:09AM *  4 points [-]

The video of babies has the advantage because they are moving around. If the bunny hopped and sniffed things and twitched its nose and groomed its whiskers and nibbled on parsley and crept under a bush and peered out at you, it would be 75,119 times cuter than them.

Comment author: taw 22 February 2010 01:55:09PM 2 points [-]

I don't find these babies cute at all, and their voices are quite unpleasant. (also I have a cat, but no babies)

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:46:57AM 1 point [-]

It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me.

Definitely not domestic. That's a wild cottontail of some kind.

In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

I wonder what the distribution of cuteness-responsiveness as a trait looks like. I notice that some people just don't get much from pictures like that bunny, but they'll react much more "as expected" to the baby. Speaking personally, I routinely coo over moths, spiders and bees.

Comment author: zslastman 22 October 2012 05:27:15PM 1 point [-]

Why are we all assuming that finding animals cute represents an evolved trait and isn't, for instance, a freak consequence of all the books and cartoons we're exposed to which anthropomorphize animals? (No points for guessing the other candidate for that etiology).

Comment author: first_fire 29 May 2011 06:41:50AM 1 point [-]

One possible explanation for finding babies and other small fluffy things cute is their vulnerability; babies are extremely vulnerable, and require protection. A cuteness reaction from caretakers would lead to a better standard of care and higher survivability. The caretakers find babies cute not because of any inherent cuteness of the baby, but because babies need to be taken care of and caretakers need to find ways to not find the caretaking onerous. We know we need babies to propagate the species, and we need to create reasons for ourselves to put up with the screaming and poop. Evolutionarily, thinking of babies as cute provides this reason.

It also provides a reason to find small fluffy animals cute: adult animals are a better food source, so it is advantageous for us to wish to nurture the small fluffy animals into large delicious animals.

Comment author: chaosmosis 22 October 2012 09:52:59PM *  2 points [-]

I agree that cuteness highly correlates with vulnerability, at least for me.

I'd also like to note that babies bring my cuteness meter into clash with my ugliness meter. Babies are simultaneously cute and repulsive, because they look like human beings who have been in an accident or who have been deformed. They're more cute than repulsive, though.

Comment author: pelius 07 March 2010 12:12:10PM 1 point [-]

Psychological conditioning, rather than simple evolutionary instinct, is a major factor in our modern Western viewpoint concerning baby human vs. baby animal cuteness. We must consider the impact a century of books, cartoons, movies, and teddy bears has on our perception of this matter. This programming begins at infancy before we are even conscious of it, familiarizing and humanizing creatures that our ancestors not far back in time would have slaughtered, eaten, or killed for sport without guilt.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:22:08PM 1 point [-]

There's probably something to that. While pets are kept all over the world, there definitely seems to be a big difference made by culture. I imagine socioeconomic status has something to do with it as well. I've had friends, both continental European and from various other parts of the world, who thought American society, having so many pets so visibly, was weird and possibly a bit disturbingly neotenic. Working class folks and people from early-generation diaspora families seem to rate especially likely to be weirded by it, in my experience. One of my Somali friends found the fact that I keep a cat weird, and kept worrying she was going to bite her randomly (to be fair, reading cat body language is a skill not everyone possesses). They have cats in Somalia, of course, and she was raised in North America, but the position and frequency of pets in Somali culture is just not the same...it's different enough that a lot of Somali people I talk to will profess that Somali people just don't keep pets. Not because it's a true universal statement, just because white American norms around pets seem odd.

Comment author: jimrandomh 23 February 2010 03:11:26AM 1 point [-]

One more possibility: our cuteness detector is simply our threat detector for animate objects with a minus sign. Bunnies are especially cute because we're especially confident that they can't hurt us. People who feel threatened by the responsibility that babies represent don't find them cute.

Comment author: Jordan 23 February 2010 03:57:07AM 2 points [-]

A lot of predators have pretty adorable cubs. If anything the babies should be identified as more of a threat, since the mother protecting them will usually be more motivated than if she were simply trying to eat you.

Comment author: Ryan 23 February 2010 03:52:18AM 1 point [-]

May be something to that. Other animals have an innocence factor about them that humans lose pretty quickly for me. Especially by 2 years old or so, I start finding some human kid behavior more manipulative than cute.

Comment author: aausch 23 February 2010 01:06:46AM 1 point [-]

If I don't eat the bunny, I'm sure to find something else to eat. If I eat the bunny, though, it's definitely not going to be alive anymore (attack of the zombie digested bunnies anyone?)

There isn't as much pressure on human evolution to avoid making cuteness mistakes, as there is on bunny evolution to be cute. If evolution were to move fast enough, and the cuteness complex would be hackable, it seems possible to me that things would evolve to hack it (and beat out babies at it).

Comment author: prase 22 February 2010 06:22:52PM 1 point [-]

What about domestication?

There may be two sides of the effect. First, sense of cuteness could lead people to keep domestic animals, and having domestic animals was an evolutionary advantage. Second, the way how animals lose their cuteness when they are older may be explained by our need to eat them later.

Or, alternatively, we can think that animal cuteness has evolved first when people domesticated dogs, which were one of the first domestic species, and has nothing to do with eating them later - rabbit cuteness being a side effect. Baby cuteness could be originally a different instinct, but these two instincts later merged.

We need more data. Cultural influences play certainly some role, whose extent is hardly predictable to me. One may do some research of how cuteness is perceived within primitive tribes at New Guinea, for example. I am far from sure that cuteness is mainly a "hardwired" feeling, as opposed to learned.

Comment author: JamesAndrix 22 February 2010 06:00:34PM 1 point [-]

Ahh, but it's a baby bunny. If cuteness is a baby-protector, it might have begun a long time ago, maybe even when we were on four legs and furry. It might not not have had time to catch up with our change into big skulled hairless monster apes.

Comment author: tut 22 February 2010 12:43:15PM 1 point [-]

... there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

Yup. I think that this is more similar to the human ancestors that needed to be cute in order to be taken care of than any modern infants are.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 07:50:03AM 1 point [-]

I just search google images for 'cute baby' and 'cute bunny'. The only baby I saw that wasn't cuter than a bunny was one that was photoshopped to have rabbit teeth.

Comment author: Sticky 22 February 2010 03:41:23PM 1 point [-]

Not photoshop. That's a pacifier with plastic buckteeth on the outside. It's supposed to be funny.

Comment author: gwern 22 February 2010 03:17:59PM 1 point [-]

Buckteeth are extremely negative cultural signs, though.

Comment author: spriteless 22 February 2010 05:13:54AM 1 point [-]

I though rabbits had to be cuter because more rabbits eat their children than do humans. They never stopped selecting for that.

Comment author: byrnema 22 February 2010 04:33:29PM *  5 points [-]

That's very funny.

A particularly irreverent friend and I once agreed that babies are cute in a way that somehow, strangely triggers a desire to eat them! It's probably not a desire to actually eat them, but some grooming-thingy, but it's still a strange impulse to experience. (To explain it in case you don't know what I'm talking about, it's an impulse to do something like bite and nibble them all over, but maybe it doesn't work because they don't have fur or what not. )

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 05:24:58AM 3 points [-]

Why would this make rabbits cuter to humans?

Comment author: Sticky 22 February 2010 06:50:32AM *  2 points [-]

I'm guessing it's because cute rabbits get eaten less than non-cute rabbits, thus exerting selection pressure in favor of cuteness, which presumably is the same in all... something. Mammals?

Sounds a little strained to me, though.

Comment author: orthonormal 22 February 2010 09:14:11AM 4 points [-]

The point is that cute is almost certainly a 2-place word.