Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
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.
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Comments (823)
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.
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.)
You're wrong. That baby is way cuter than the bunny.
For people with cutoffs for low karma comments: Poll on relative cuteness of babies and bunnies - karma balance.
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.
Then it fails again. People get attached to pets. They tend not to eat them, even if they're edible.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
What do "low fat" and "high quality" have to do with one another?
Well, yes, but it is a little nitpicking, isn't it? The point is that meat isn't the reason why most of the dogs and horses are and were kept.
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.
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.
Cats are cuter than bunnies.
Catgirls are cuter than cats.
I think that's a different meaning of "cute".
Do you think the two meanings of cute are mutally exclusive? In me they're mutually reinforcing, at least some of the time.
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.
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
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.
"An". "An" obvious answer. There's at least one other which has been proposed in other replies to this post: social conditioning.
I have to say that yours is quite interesting, however. What else does it predict?
That lots of other animals should share our opinions about cuteness.
What komponisto said. Also, we should expect to find an extremely adorable common ancestor.
This would also explain the tendency to associate fuzziness with cuteness.
I don't see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don't , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call "cute". Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn't imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally. On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren't- that for human's cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren't much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn't expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.
That instincts are orders of magnitude slower to evolve than physical attributes at the scale of 'people and bunnies'.
The instincts have to reference physical attributes to identify cute things. If physical appearance evolves so quickly, how can the instinct continue to apply to it?
IOW, to accept this theory, it is necessary to believe that the things we find cute are all similar to that shared ancestor (or shared-ancestral juvenile). Does anyone know if this actually makes sense within what we know of ur-Mammalian creatures?
If attraction instincts (cuteness or sexual) evolve much more slowly than physical attributes, then shouldn't supermodels be chimpier than they are?
This pretty much convinced me that the fine variances of sexiness have much more to do with memes than genes. It shouldn't be hard to test if it is the case with cuteness as well: just find a culture that hasn't been exposed to Disney/Pixar films.
Yes. But there is no reason to think the cuteness attraction instinct and the sexual attraction instinct evolve at the same rate or even at a rate of the same order of magnitude. Finding offspring less cute than your ancestors did is far less likely to lead to genetic death than failing to mate with those with the best traits. That seems obvious to me anyway, I could be wrong.
Is 'supermodels' supposed to be shorthand for 'highly sexually attractive'? Supermodels are not generally the women who are the most sexually attractive to heterosexual males but are selected for a variety of other attributes such as a 'striking' appearance, height and extreme slenderness.
That said, women who are considered very sexually attractive are not particularly chimpy either. They do share other traits that are not as common amongst supermodels however.
How about, the closer something is to human, the more cute? Since there will be 2 million years of pressure honing 'cuteness' to primate needs, and counteracting the x million years of pressure about rabbits.
In that case the fact that other animals are often much cuter than humans completely refutes the theory.
It sure does.
Not if the the cuteness effect was overwhelmed by selection for other traits. That is the part I added on edit. It might be that we're still working with the cuteness criteria of rabbit-like ancestors.
'other trait'? Unless you have a specific other factor in mind, it's just a fully general counterargument. (I nullify your other traits with other-other traits!)
Huh? The traits in us that make babies less cute than bunnies. Hairlessness appears to be a popular example (most people think furry things are cute), there may be more. Maybe baby eyes are smaller relative to their head than bunnies because of selection for larger brains. It is true that you can't disprove the hypothesis by finding trait that makes bunnies cuter than babies that I haven't thought of. The argument is general in that sense. But we can evaluate the hypothesis in the case of each trait. Name a trait and then we can see if our explanation of that trait is the kind of thing that would be selected for over cuteness.
Why would our cuteness criteria have not changed to reflect baby traits (like small eyes which are selected for on non-cute grounds)?
Hrm... with regards to your edit, wouldn't there still then be the pressures for our "cuteness criteria" to evolve to prefer the new look of babies?
Maybe. It depends. The precise function our cuteness response had for ancestors might be fulfilled by some other feature or perhaps the ancestral environment didn't select individuals that way. Or maybe the cuteness criteria did evolve a little... just not has fast as our physical features did. Actually, I think we should expect it to evolve slower than our physical features just because plenty less-cute individuals will survive.
But then shouldn't we expect similar stuff to happen for rabbits? for them to evolve away from the primordial shared cuteness criteria?
Actually, wait... human babies are rather more helpless than the babies of most other mammals, right? Shouldn't more helplessness, more (and longer) dependence on adults result in stronger perception of cuteness of them? (via shifts in their appearance and our criteria)?
Okay, now I'm just plain confused!
They may have. Just not as much.
I don't think the reason modern humans take care of their children is just about how cute they are. We've developed additional instincts to encourage child rearing (cultural pressure, some more specialized attachments that individual parents have with just their children and not with other cute things). This is what I mean by the function being fulfilled by another feature. This isn't evidence of anything in particular but cuteness feels sort of cognitively primitive, doesn't it? Like fear? I don't know if associating qualia like that is a permissible inference.
I've actually ranked this hypothesis third behind "Babies are cuter after all." and "Coincidental superstimulus".
It's not much of a coincidence if most mammals have similar parental care-inducing cues - including big eyes. Nor is it a coincidence that baby rabbits exhibit such infantile traits more than human children do - this post deliberately chose rabbits as an example because they have cute babies. I rate all this as not adding up to a coincidence at all.
Do we know whether adult rabbits find baby rabbits cute? If not, that would count against the common ancestor hypothesis.
Do we know whether adult non-primate mammals find anything cute? What's a description of their behavior in such a case?
So far I've only seen descriptions of animals adopting other-species young to raise. I think child-raising instincts are separate from cuteness responses, in other animals as well as in humans.
*Do we know whether adult non-primate mammals find anything cute? *
Very occasionally
And not for long.
From the comments on the article you linked, the cheetahs happily ate the impala. Go to http://www.biosphoto.com/ and search for "cheetah AND impala". You'll find these photos as well as the ones from a few minutes later...
Is your theory that cats playing with live food before killing it is, in general, an effect of the food's cuteness?
Also in the comments, the assertion that the impala that was eaten was an adult eaten earlier. Once sated, the cheetahs were not interested in eating the younger impala.
True, it's not clear which is the complete account. At the very least, photos of some impala(s) being eaten and of this one being played with were seemingly taken in one session.
I believe that's a different sort of play, consisting of repeated chasing and catching.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
There are a number of stories of mammals 'adopting' babies of other species in zoos. Here's one example. There seem to have been some misleading emails including pictures related to this story but as far as I can tell it is true that there have been instances of both a pig raising tiger cubs and a tiger raising piglets.
I have to admit, I wouldn't have thought of this.
1) The baby is far cuter than the rabbit.
2) There's nothing wrong with a stimulus having a superstimulus.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
Personally I agree, but many people report that they find babies cute. It's not universal.
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.
Probably not.
I don't have strong opinion if babies are above or below 0-cuteness level, it seems to vary from person to person - but they're definitely below mammal average baby cuteness.
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?
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:
It's not 1 of 5000 species of mammals which is cuter than human babies - it seems like most of them are.
That's my point. Jack's theory, which rests entirely on the fact other animals look similar to human babies, does not explain why many animals are cute while not a single animal is (widely) sexually attractive.
Well, "catgirls" seem to have large appeal, but that's easily explained away - they're 99% human with 1% added kitten for massive cuteness signal in a way that doesn't interfere with any human sexual signals. It's a lot like 99% with 1% added flower in form of perfume being more sexually attractive than 100% natural human.
Most? You think there are more than 2500 species which adult humans would say are cuter than babies? That seems wildly implausible to me; I'd say no more than 300 or so are on par with babies, and fewer exceed it. That isn't too much; surely you could list maybe not >300 species but a measly 150.
How about birds? >10,000 species there; you think there are >5,000 extremely cute birds?
I'd venture that there isn't even a bare majority of cuteness at zoos - institutions would would select for cuteness.
If I had a list of species-weighted random pictures of mammals, I would take the bet that random mammal baby is cuter than human baby.
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.
Where do you get this - "Superstimuli are typically artificial"?
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".
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.
Oh, it's absolutely possible -- this I why couched the phrasing in terms of "typically" and "tend to".
And, well, votes are noisy.
If I had to ascribe a reason, it would be definitional -- superstimulus could be used to just mean "trigger the adaptation more than what the adaptation was for", which need not imply any significant harm, or it could be used to mean "will trigger the adaptation to such a strong extent, that it does cause harm, either by inappropriate behavior to the stimulus, or disrupting appropriate behavior to the stimulus it was adapted for."
I think the latter definition is more useful, though I admit that the examples I've tried to find for excluding based on it (finding patterns in randomness, finding faces in car grills) also didn't trigger more than the usual stimulus, so would have been excluded from the first definition as well.
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.
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.
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".
How does the same cuckoo manage to be attractive to so many host birds?
Cuteness actually disgusts me a little, and I find the baby more off-putting than the rabbit, so I guess I think the baby cuter too.
There are some correlations that suggest a possible relationship between finding cute things disgusting and psychopathy.
(Non-edited version was over-confident, some comments below reflect that)
Citation needed.
This is far cuter than all of them put together.
What sort of nurturing behavior do you feel compelled to exhibit toward paperclips? Now I'm curious.
These babies are soooo much cuter than your bunny.
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.
I don't know. I just looked at some bunny videos. Cute. But those babies are way more adorable.
There's a selection effect - people take more videos of babies than they do of bunnies. That allows higher variance and better-quality high-end videos.
Fair enough. But the rest of our evidence consists of two pictures you selected! The selection bias potential there is way worse.
You have my word that the baby was the cutest baby in the first several pages of results for "cute baby" on a Google image search by my own lights, and the bunny was just the cutest bunny I happened to have on my hard drive.
Edit: Actually, I did reject one cuter baby because the picture was watermarked.
Hrm... that at least brings up a possibility... Any chance that there's much higher variance in the appearance of baby bunnies than in baby humans? In that case "find the cutest" rather than "find average" might go rather farther with bunnies than humans.
Probably not variance that's easily detectable to humans.
Well, there was a supposed ~10000 humans bottleneck, not too far ago, evolutionarily speaking, so humans really do have less variance than many species.
How long have you been collecting pictures of cute bunnies on your hard drive? :-)
Scratch that. The same picture is also first in google hits for "cute bunny"
Still, perhaps a larger data set makes sense.
I don't know how long I've been doing it, but my "Lagomorpha" folder contains 14 images.
I don't find these babies cute at all, and their voices are quite unpleasant. (also I have a cat, but no babies)
I though rabbits had to be cuter because more rabbits eat their children than do humans. They never stopped selecting for that.
Why would this make rabbits cuter to humans?
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.
Why would how humans feel towards rabbits effect how likely they are to be eaten by their rabbit parents?
It wouldn't. That's supposed to be a side effect.
The point is that cute is almost certainly a 2-place word.
Rabbits are herbivores.
But the baby rabbits just look so tasty.
Eating one's offspring is an adaptive strategy at times of scarcity, especially for species at the r end of the selection spectrum. Of course, still more adaptive would be to eat the offspring of other, genetically-distant individuals, but for herbivores that is usually much harder to arrange.
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. )
Aaah! Superstimulus!
You call THAT a superstimulus?
Now this is a superstimulus!
No this is a superstimulus!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You're right - I should've said "selected" instead of "bred" - they became cuter under selection pressure from humans.
Saying dogs bred themselves implies a motive rather than an evolutionary selection bias. Humans do consciously breed dogs, while cuter dogs merely happened to be more successful around humans.
Notably, it is in the human interaction that the dogs' cuteness is helpful, whoever it ends up being helpful to.
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.
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.
Buckteeth are extremely negative cultural signs, though.
Not photoshop. That's a pacifier with plastic buckteeth on the outside. It's supposed to be funny.
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.)
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?
"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?"
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.
Excellent observation. I was thinking the same thing.
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  . Please do not reply to yourself. One picture per post please.
I'll start with the first Google Images result for "cute":

Not fair, there's no way we could compete with the chipmunkula.
You guys are no fun! :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
Baby cats and dogs also might not be dangerous, but might be dangerous to mess with as well.
If more trustworthy strangers have cuter babies, does this mean that all animals are more trustworthy than people?
Do people who consider adult cats and dogs dangerous find kittens and puppies cute? I've only known a few people in the former categories, but those people didn't.
Of course - there are no evil cats plotting to take over the world.
It can't just be harmlessness-- all sorts of things (like pencils) are harmless but not cute.
You can kill someone with a pencil.
I'm sure you could contrive a way to kill someone with a bunny.
Certainly. I can imagine several contrived ways how to use a bunny as a weapon, while I don't know how to kill someone with a soap bubble. Still, bunny is cuter.
Contrived ways for bunnies to kill themselves:
http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/Bunny_Suicide_Comic_Pics_226_2007.php
But the pencil can't kill someone on its own. The fear attaches to the pencil-wielder, who after all can also kill someone with their bare hands.
The cute=harmless hypothesis would predict that writing utensils of equal size that are more difficult to kill or harm with, say a brush or a crayon, are cuter. And also that soap bubbles are cuter than most other lifeless objects.
There's a website like hot-or-not for cuteness. Highly relevant.
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?
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.
Mothers praise and fuss over human babies that cutely imitate adults. It seems like good training for a critter that's going to grow mirror neurons and a sense of empathy.
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.
Fundamentally, aren't you asking why furry mammals are cuter than non-furry mammals?
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.
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.
Same here.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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:
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."
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...
"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.
mattalyst said:
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.
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.
That's my intuition, also.
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.
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.
This just rephrases the question as "why are bunnies cute?"
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.
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.
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.
Very compactly put. The data simply do not contradict the theory in the first place.