An article from the NYT on Cuteness as an evolutionary trait.
So what is cute? "bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others."
As you may have imagined, "Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense." Our babies are so vulnerable, we are attracted to even the slightest indication of them.
"The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession."
They also say how babies did not evolve to be cute but we evolved to find them cute. So companies like disney take into consideration what is cute and put it on nonhuman things like ducks. So they give ducks forward facing eyes even though it makes no sense.
And like all good things in life, "New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine"
Also, the whole cuteness thing in Japan has a name! "kawaii." Amazing.
Posted by bluprnt at January 15, 2006 11:46 PM