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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W cute as a button Bryant. There's Jerry Squee rolling. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast is cute. That's right. The science of cute.

Yeah, I'm excited about this one I've been wanting to do for a while. I know.

I remember like I was one of the first things you ever said to me when we met in the office. Oh, how cute you are.

Well, now, we were in the break room and I saw a picture of a baby panda. Sure. And I just started to melt. Yeah. And you went, Hey, jerk. You ever wonder why you think things are cute? Yeah, I bet there's science behind that. Maybe we should talk about it one day. And look, here we are.

What was that, 12, 13 years ago or something like that? Yeah, man, you really responded to that aggression, didn't you? I did.

So, Chuck. Yes. Have you ever heard of Mickey Mouse?

Oh, I know several mice, but I've never heard of Mickey Mouse. You've only heard a model muck. Yes. And Mickey Mouse. Well, let me tell you about Mickey Mouse. He's actually the mascot of a very large entertainment corporation called Disney. Don't know. They own Walt Disney World, Walt Disney Land. I think ABC owns them there. They're affiliated with ESPN. They're very, very big. But they have this mascot. It's a mouse.

And his name's Mickey. It's weird. He's kind of big, especially abroad. But if you look at Mickey today, you think, wow, that's a really cute mouse. Doesn't really look like a mouse is black and white, basically, or brownish in black. But also his features are very much not mouse like. But if you were to go back and look at the beginning of Mickey, I think he's from the 1920s, late 1920s in his earliest cartoons, he looked a lot more mousy.

Yeah, a cartoon mouse. But he had, you know, as pointed features, not nearly as cute. Yeah. But then if you fast forward about 10 years later, by the time 1938 rolls around, he's in something called the Brave Tailor. That was one of his shorts where I think he defeats a giant or something like that. He looks full blown Mickey Mouse, but he looks way cuter. And they had done a few things to him.

They had, like, made his eyes bigger. They'd made his features rounder, less pointed. He had big gloves and big shoes. Now he's kind of plump and oversized features. And he had gotten cute. And the scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, who really deserves his own episode like Carl Sagan, does just a really interesting dude. He said that Disney and his animators had stumbled upon something that the zoologists anthologist Conrad Lawrence termed Kinchen schema. I think I got that right.

Right. Yeah. Khankan schema a very nice but like years before Conrad Lawrence ever did that, they had just kind of naturally figured out, like, oh, this can be way more appealing if we if we exaggerate these particular features. And it turns out what they had done is make him literally cuter by the very scientific definition of cuteness.

Yeah. So Lauryn's was an Austrian scientist and in the forties came up with this. And this made me feel quite good about myself actually looking over this list about physical qualities that and it's not just a person can be an animal. As we'll see, a lot of this is animal based. Right. But these things, these traits that would evoke a positive response, a very strong, positive response. And they are large, said to me, hi, protruding forehead.

You've always said you have a five head. If anything, it's average large eyes, sort of average chubby cheeks. Bingo.

Oh, you should make the cheeks make a sonic appearance. Very nice.

It's been years. Still as moist as ever. Sorry, everyone. Uh, chubby cheeks, small nose. I'm an average nose, small mouth and chin. I'd say average short, thick extremities. I actually have sort of skinny legs. I'll carry my weight between my chin and my belt. OK, plump body shape. Bingo. I am scientifically half cute. You are very cute. I mean that's definitely that's not even up for debate really.

I used to get called cute by the ladies. Not handsome but cute.

There's a TV I saw that Paul McCartney hated being known as the cute Beatle. Probably for the same, you know, the same difference is that you just mentioned probably. But like what you just said, this list, you just you just. You rattled off that is Lawrences Kinchen schema or baby schema or baby ness, which is basically like if you put all these things together, you have what amounts to what we humans consider cute. And you can extrapolate, like you were saying, not just on babies, but on to other animals that are on to like cartoon characters.

Like animals. Really?

Yeah. You either have these things and you're regarded as cute or you don't. And you're not exactly. Yeah, that's a really good point that you can you can not only have this, you can also lack it. And that that has that modulates our response to whatever that thing is.

Yeah. And it's also important to point out that this is these are guidelines, scientific sort of guidelines and truisms, but not across the board. Like some people, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and cuteness is sure. So some people might look at a baby, oh, I don't know, just some sort of weird reptilian thing that has none of these traits and think it's super cute as well, right?

Yeah, yeah. It is kind of subjective, but there does seem to be a if not universal or widely tapped into a sense of what's cute and what's not, you know what I mean.

Yeah. So let me rephrase that. The person that thinks the baby lizard that has none of these traits is cute. They probably also think the panda is cute. Right?

You know, I'm saying. Right. Yeah.

They're probably not disgusted or just totally turned off by the panda, that dirty, ugly baby kitten.

Yeah, it's so. So Lauryn's was he compiled this list based on his observations. I guess from what I read, like this whole study of cuteness is pretty young as far as scientific investigation goes. So, you know, we're still figuring it out. It's still developing as it goes along. Some of the studies involved are fairly suspect, but there seems to be this this kind of general acceptance of Lorenz's kindie Kinchen schema, which is that it was just it's so it's so obviously correct that from what I read, some people haven't even investigated, which is good and bad.

Lawrence was a behaviorist and he actually we met him first in our animal imprinting episode, which is a very good one. But he studied that. But he put this all together to study behaviors. And what he was studying is exactly how babies get adult humans who may not even be their parents to respond to them in a way that that adult wants to take care of that baby. And what he what he came up with was this Kinchen scheme of cuteness, what he said unlocks innate instincts in humans that basically triggers like automatic behaviors like, oh, I want to make sure that you stay alive.

So I'm going to go find you some food, that kind of stuff. Yeah.

And it corresponds to helplessness at birth. There's a direct correlation between how cute you look and how how little you can get by on your own. In the animal kingdom, most mammals are born very small, very helpless, many months, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years of care before they can go off and kind of do their own thing. That's called altricial. What to take to being born helpless here. Altricial. Yeah. So if you're altricial, you're probably almost 100 percent more cute than an animal that is born that can kind of run right out and do things on their own.

Probably not as cute. That's precocious.

Yeah, altricial and precocious. Right.

And the thing is, is like if you step back like it's just so easy to just overlook this. And if you really start to think about this cuteness has been this adaptive, I guess, evolutionary trait that's just been hiding in plain sight until Llorens really put his finger on it. But if you step back and think about it, there's no there's no innate or there's no reason that a baby has in and of itself to evoke a response in a human, even its parents, to want to take care of it.

But it needs that because it is an altricial species. Humans are in altricial species big time. They'll just die out if you don't take care of a baby and if enough babies die out, eventually humanity dies out, the species dies out. So it's an adaptation to make somebody want to take care of you. And that is what Llorens figured out. That cuteness is that trigger that we find babies cute and it makes us want to take care of them.

And that is one of the most mind blowing things I know. Yeah. I mean, if you look at human babies, human babies are born. Pretty early in their development, like if all things being equal, human baby should probably be born six months later than they are. Yeah, but they're not. Human babies come out very early. They come out before their little Fontanella are even formed. They just need a lot of care.

And they're. They're born that, like human babies are small so they can fit out of the birth canal, their little noses are cartilage so they don't get broken on the way out like, you know, babies should have larger heads and should have like that should. But you know what I'm saying, fully formed like strong noses. But they wouldn't be able to come out of a lady if that was the case.

Yeah, because our brains have developed to be so big and our craniums have developed in response to that, that like we're evolutionarily speaking or developmentally speaking, we're underdeveloped when we're born, even though we would have been born like a normal a normal gestation period for a human compared to other species. It's like you're at this kid's out a little. This kid doesn't baked fully, you know, I'm saying. And so that really makes human babies, even among, you know, other mammals that are altricial, super dependent on caregivers to make sure that it survives.

Yeah. So like a human baby's head is really large compared to their body. And these are you know, these are some of the cuteness traits that we mentioned early on. Their eyes, you know, your eyes are really grow. Your eyes are about the same size. I didn't know that, did you? Yeah. That's why when you look at some babies, you're like, look how huge their eyes are. Yeah. It's just because they're on a little tiny face, it makes sense.

But I just had never known that you're you're born, which is basically the size that they're going to be when you grow up.

I think if you really work them out, they can beef up a little bit, though. Okay. Oinking We mentioned those tiny little noses, super cute and very bendy, their little baby cheeks and everything's soft. So you can get out of that birth canal and, you know, formula and mother's milk keep you kind of chunky and full. You know, nobody's going to put a baby on a diet. No good for the skin is very loose and soft.

So, you know, if you go through a big growth spurt, it doesn't, you know, split open. Sounds gross. It does. And then, you know, the way babies move it, it's just very cute. Their babies are awkward and they're clumsy and they don't, like, have the definition to, like, manipulate these these muscle groups very well. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's awkward and gawky and super cute. All of the stuff together is cute to us. And it raises the question like, did babies evolve? Human babies evolved to fit our definition of cute.

No. Or did our definition. Actually, I've seen both. Oh really? I've seen both. So it makes sense that like our definition of what's cute and what we respond to is cute would be based on the average human baby. But you can also take an average human baby and tweak like digitally a picture of a baby and tweak it to maximum cuteness. And so there's this other idea that, OK, maybe originally our idea of cuteness was based on baby features, but the cutest babies would logically get the most response and would be the most care.

Most likely. Yeah. And would be the most likely to survive and thrive and go on to reproduce. So it is entirely possible that we have USPI as a species have gotten cuter over the over the eons because of selection of for the cutest babies.

Well, and that's been critical to our survival. Yeah. You know, it's when you see something like that, when you see a baby chick, you your instinct is to pick it up and cradle it and make sure you know that a tree branch doesn't fall on it. Right. And it's the same goes for babies. Yeah. Because they share a lot of the same similarities, the same can can can schema. I wish that kin was in in their wish.

It was just condensed schema. Don't call it that then. I want to get things wrong all the time. If we do we do.

It's usually not purposely OK, but that same set of traits can apply to other animals. It was like you were saying, you know, animals that fall into that set of traits appear cute to us and we want to save them. We want to take care of them like a little baby. Giraffe has huge eyes. Its features are kind of small compared to a larger adult, which even adult giraffes are awfully cute. But one of the things that a baby giraffe is going to get you with is hobbling around, trying to stand up that for him.

They hit you with those little shaky legs. Look out. Yeah, and that reminds us or reminds some very ancient part of our brain of a human infant, you know, like developing its motor skills. So it seems like. It's not like our brains are confused, like you're not looking at a baby giraffe, like look at that baby, you may not love it. It's just it triggers the same part of the brain that seeing a human infant does because of that same set of characteristics.

Yeah, like there was a study found a mental floss from 2009 where scientists reported that people in the study that viewed really cute images of puppies and kittens performed better in the game of operation. You know, a kid's game. Yeah. Than people who saw less like that saw pictures of grown up dogs and cats. So it just innately triggers this care response. It's really, really interesting. Yeah.

And so what Llorens called that innate leasers that that you see a cute baby and the cuteness acts as an innate relaxer, which triggers a set of inborn instincts in every human to take care of that baby. And that apparently hasn't necessarily borne out. But there is a lot of ah, there's an increasing amount of documentation about how seeing something cute affects the brain. And I propose that we take a commercial break and then come back and talk about that afterward.

Agreed. We'll be right back.

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So I think before we dive into what you're talking about, I do want to mention the wolf puppy thing. I thought it was pretty interesting is that there is an example of a coevolved trade with the human brain that triggers that cuteness response. When you look at wolves, wild wolves, apparently, and these were pre dogs, basically. Right. They don't have this muscle. Called the here we go with some Latin, I guess, Levator Angouleme oculi Maryalice, he just made a demon appear.

My God, this muscle they don't have and their eyebrows and apparently that is the muscle that can make what we think of as puppy dog eyes. Dogs that came later did evolve that muscle. And then we're bred for it because it made people mountainside. Yeah. So that's why wolves, which is interesting, like wolves have that sort of scowl and they can't help it.

But then I looked at Wolf puppy pictures and it's pretty cute, but maybe it's not in the eyes. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know what it is either, but I think that raises a really good question. That also kind of points out it like this. This research is still very young and there's contradictory information coming in. And a lot of it is just based on intuition and that kind of thing. But there are like you said, there's that there are people walking around who think like that baby lizard is super cute. You know, I'm saying like it it's not entirely universal.

And, you know, maybe those wolf puppies have some other traits that have nothing to do with the eyes that that are hijacking your brain to. The point that stands out to me is that that that caregiving instinct that Llorens pointed out or whatever, whatever weird brain pathway we have that's triggered by seeing something cute is that it extends beyond humans. And I think that that kind of that makes humanity as a species like that much greater, in my opinion, like that caregiving impulse can extend beyond humans.

And I mean, that explains pets right there. Like, I don't think we would have pets if that wasn't true. Yeah. You know, I mean, we'd have, like, guard dogs or something still. But, you know, not a pet. There would be German shepherds. There would be nothing. But and they'd all be mean is snakes. And we probably have snakes, too, that rode the German shepherds, yet they still wouldn't be pets.

Yeah. Baby snakes. Not so cute. There's also that weird thing where something is so ugly. It's cute as a young thing.

OK, so that's a Japanese term. We'll talk about Hawaii later. But there's something called Kimmo Kawaii, which is so gross. Cute. Oh interesting. Yeah. They've, they've got something. They're like the Germans, but further east they have like a name and a term in India for everything, you know.

All right. We'll put a pin in that because we did promise the science of cute. So we're going to have to look at we're going to look at the brain and actually what's going on there. Yeah, and they've done that. Of course, they've put people in the wonder machine and they have shown people pictures of baby faces to see what lights up. And when that happens, you get a really strong, immediate response and what's called the orbitofrontal cortex, which is where we regulate our emotions and our pleasure.

And it's a really, really fast response. One tenth of a second. It doesn't take long when you see that baby or that puppy or whatever, you don't it doesn't take you long to to immediately think I need to care for that thing and hold that thing.

Yeah. Because so that orbitofrontal cortex apparently has something to do with the reward system. So your attention is captured very quickly and you get a little burst of pleasure seeing that that cute baby. And then there's another thing to that that that came out of that 2009 study using operation that all of a sudden your attention is very much focused and you can complete tasks much better or at least remarkably better than you could without seeing something cute.

So it really does suggest we have this inborn pathway to respond to something cute in a pleasurable way with warm feelings that trigger an ability, a greater, more focused ability to do something like, for example, to care for or feed a baby or that kind of thing. That seems to be borne out like Loren's is neat release or seems to be being discovered by neurology right now.

Which is interesting, though, because caring for a baby is not. In my experience, something you need that kind of focus for, it's not like putting together a little model house with tiny pieces of furniture, it's just like keep this thing alive.

Right. But maybe maybe that's like rather than being like, oh, you know, I think I'd rather break the law, the lawn instead. Right. And just stop feeding the baby. You know, I'm saying like, you're your attention to the task at hand, right? A little more focus. So you're less distracted. Yeah. That's a different kind of focus. Sure. Yeah. Luckily, it doesn't take much brains because it's a lot of not smart parents out there.

That is true. So in that response, that speedy response and the orbitofrontal cortex, when you see that baby men and women both have that same spike. But I think women report stronger caregiving, which they chalk up to just gender roles, basically, and not necessarily anything to do with the brain itself.

Yeah, because the same areas light up for men and women. I guess to the same degree it's just self reported is different. Right. Right. And then apparently also like this, this is not just parents who experience this like a human being will or a typical human being will experience this.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. We're like as an adoptive parent, you know, this is my daughter is not my seed, but I can't look at it, but I can't like I have nothing to base it on. But I can't imagine a stronger connection or a stronger instinct to care. Give totally. And so it's it's an important trait, clearly, because like you've seen movies where people find like a baby like abandoned by the dumpster and that, you know, you run out and, you know, I suppose some people might just say, call it in and say, hey, there's a baby over here.

I'm not going near it. But a human's inclination is to run over and pick that baby up totally and wrap it up in something warm and then maybe call the cops or whatever. Right.

And like you said, like run over there like an urgent thing that your brain would just be like, get over there. Right.

The helpless thing out there by a dumpster. Let's go get it.

Yeah, that apparently would come probably more from the baby's cry, which I guess also ignites, like, the same kind of pathway as cuteness does. But it's a different it's slightly different. There's not necessarily a reward. It's more like urgency than they call that a biological siren, which which would, you know, get you over there really quickly. But it's not necessarily because you saw you know, you thought about how cute the baby is in those swaddling clothes.

Right. Sound is definitely important. Like that same study. If you hear babies laughter or even the smell of a baby, your brain lights up in the same way.

Yeah. So like that we're presented with the entire cute package of everything that's great about baby sound smell. They are really deeply manipulative, I think is what you're meant to take away from this episode.

They are just tiny little monsters saying, like, take care of me for eight years. That's right. And possibly beyond if I'm Genex. Exactly. It was a Genex or Millennial's, I don't know, I feel like there were plenty of Gen Xers that lived in the basement, right? You're totally right there. Maybe that's every generation. But we weren't coddled as much.

Oh, boy. Get us. Cancel the boy.

Uh, yeah. So let's move on from that. Oh, wait. Here's another thing. And this is the saddest finding ever. OK. Oh yeah.

When they did this study that that brain activity was diminished when they were shown baby faces that were had some sort of facial disruption like a cleft palate. And that is really one of the saddest things you can imagine hearing.

Yeah. Because, I mean, that would that would account for, you know, what I was talking about earlier about how cuteness is selected for that. There's this like by no one's fault of their own, but just through, you know, the evolutionary process of these these neural connections that were born that are ready to make, like, wanting to respond to something cute. If you're presented with something that doesn't quite line up with that Kinchen schema, that baby's going to have a much harder time getting that same response from from somebody than just a traditionally cute baby.

Well, it is brutal. It's extraordinarily sad. I think we need to do an episode on cleft palates to that. That stood out to me that we haven't done that. Yeah, yeah.

Or even worse. And, you know, in ancient times, those babies would be walked out to the woods and left, you know.

Yeah, for sure. You know, Carl Lawrence apparently said that the kewpie doll in our kewpie mayonnaise. So the doll that that's based on, if you take a look at its face, that in Lawrence's opinion, that was the maximum exaggeration that you could reach of Kinchen schema before violating it, and that afterward what was beyond it was it wasn't coined at the time. But what he was talking about was basically an uncanny valley, like there's your brain would start to be like, wait, there's something something is somewhere out of order here.

So it's weird. There's like a really apparently there's a set, a package of traits that make up what is considered cute. And straying outside of that just kind of violates it in some weird way. It violates like this this pathway that we're where we seem to be pre-programmed to have. I didn't know mayonnaise was going to make an appearance, and I did because I saw the cupie thing.

But before that, I had no idea either.

So cuteness is going to activate other parts of the brain. It's just not that super speedy response that you get in the orbitofrontal cortex. Right. Um, so if you're a parent and you have a brain, you're going to go undergo a really kind of slow change as you parent and as you take care of that baby and bond with that baby as they grow into infancy, you're going to still have that trigger of cuteness, but it's just going to be a slower response and more complex as far as your actual brain activity goes.

Yeah, supposedly that coevolved evolves with the cuteness of a baby like a newborn baby is just. Yeah, but like you look at a baby some six months, that same baby. Yeah. You have to admit, it's pretty infrequent for a baby to be cute right out of the womb. Yeah.

I mean, generally they're little alien lizard type creatures. Sure.

But wait six months in that same baby is going to look awfully cute. Yeah. You know, and within. Right. And within that six months you're going to have developed more sophisticated responses, caretaking responses to that baby's cuteness. It's pretty interesting that, like, they they both start to gel around the same time the babies start to hit peak cuteness and the caregiving stuff becomes more and more sophisticated. It goes from I need to keep this baby alive to, you know, what college is this baby?

I'm going to get this baby through college kind of stuff. You start thinking about that. Right.

And that sort of brings back what we talked about earlier as like that, that empathetic, compassionate response when it's not even your child.

Yeah, it's very important when it's not even from the same species. Right. And like you were saying, you know, people tend to rate the species that are most altricial as the cutest because they need the most help. So that pathway can be hijacked by humans, human babies and other species as well, and by people who are trying to sell you stuff. As we'll see.

That's very true. Yes, I think that. All right. We're going take a break and talk about cute aggression, something that we're pretty familiar with right after this.

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All right, so I've talked to before in the past about my wife, Emily, and when she sees puppies and babies and other cute little things, she she says stuff like, I want to I want to punch that baby in the face. I want to squeeze the life out of it. I want to I want to eat that puppy like some things that sound genuinely horrific. Yeah. Maybe not a one two punch that baby in the face that I've seen that somewhere.

But it's a thing. And it's not just her. It's an actual thing. It's called cute aggression. When you see something and you say, you know, I want to put that puppy on a plate and eat it, which is, like you said, it's very weird when you step back and think about it.

And it actually it's a very recent investigation. Like I think 2013 is the earliest I saw in one of the people who are leading the charge into studying cute aggression is a Clemson psychologist named Orianna Arigon. And she and some of her colleagues have really kind of are establishing this field of cute aggression. And the reason why Aragón is a pretty good social psychologist to be investigating this is because her specialty is Dimorphism expression's, which is contradictory emotional indicators. Yeah, they don't really seem to go together but do because it's just so common, like tears of joy.

Right. Or nervous laughter. That kind of that's a big one. And it seems that cute aggression kind of falls under that same umbrella.

Yeah. And it's interesting because you say, sure. Great cute aggression. We've got a name for it. That doesn't really explain it, though. No. And it's explained kind of like nervous laughter or tears of joy. It may be a way of regulating something that's just too overwhelming emotionally. So when they study cute aggression, they show people the cutest pictures of the cutest things, see how the brain responds and people who have the the really biggest cute, aggressive response, their brains are lighting up.

But your reward system is also lighting up at the same time. Mm hmm.

Right. But it's like an overwhelming reward response. Like, you're just it's intolerable. Yeah. And so the idea is that your brain brings you down from that by implementing like a not complimentary. What's the opposite of complimentary. Mm.

You're a big jerk that that kind of that kind of emotion like anger or aggression or hostility or something like that. Yeah. To balance it out and to bring you back down because it makes sense that if you were just sitting there experiencing overwhelming cute overload like you would, you might not ever get around to feeding that baby. You might just be sitting there like with your tongue hanging outside of your mouth drooling.

Yeah, it's interesting because like a lot of times and I've heard a lot of other people say this, but like Emily will say, like, I just want to squeeze that baby. And that's followed up with I can't even take it or like I just can't even take it with this cuteness. Like, that's that's literally true.

Like your brain can't even take it to look at those cute Aragón came up with a way to measure cute aggression by using bubble wrap. Yeah, this I didn't quite understand this. She would give bubble wrap to people and show them different pictures in the pictures that rated the highest in cuteness evoked or led to the largest number of bubbles pop.

So the idea is like if you see something cute pop bubbles or just like here, hold this and you just find yourself popping them.

I don't know. I don't know that. I don't know, actually, to tell you the truth, I think yeah, I think it's more it's meant to be like an unconscious thing. OK, like you're not supposed to be like, well, this is an eighty bubble, Kitty, you know. Sure. Nothing like that. Or it's just like you look down, you're like, oh my God, there's no more bubbles left. That cat was so cute kind of thing.

OK, I saw another explanation for cute aggression in that it's a response to a frustrated desire for caregiving.

So where where you want to go punch that baby in the face, but you know, you'll spend a significant amount of time in jail if you actually do that.

Yeah, sure. Right. Like, that's that's where that would come out. Like like that. You can't do that. It's not your baby to go snuggle and cuddle and take care of.

You can't eat puppy. You have to do it from afar. Exactly. So you have to do it from afar. So it it comes out in this mixture of cute response and aggression or aggressive words or. That kind of thing. Well, and also kind of dovetails with acute sadness, right, which is I guess Eragon coined that term as well, is where you see a puppy in a window and you go, oh, no, or oh, or make a frowny face.

That's when you see a lot when you see something really cute. And her theory is that kind of like what you're saying, like that puppy is is is in the crate at the adoption place and you can't get to it or it's just walking down the street with somebody and you're driving your car and you can't get to it. So you're expressing a kind of frustration that you can't get out of the car and squeeze the puppy.

Right. So you have to squeeze your sphincter instead. But I guess it comes out as disappointment, though. Yeah, yeah. And it would seem to be frustrated. A response to frustrated attempts at caregiving or frustrated desire to caregiver because you see something cute in your caregiving instinct is triggered or whatever you want to call it, if you don't agree with instinct. But there's nothing you can do about it because you're driving in that things going the other way so you can't do anything to to take care of it.

So you have to get that out somehow. And it seems like anger and aggression is a good way to make it subside quickly. Yeah, or but again, again, I really want to point out here, this is this is intuitive stuff. Sure. It's not stuff where it's like and this study backs this up in this study backs this up. From what I've seen, every single study in cuteness and cute aggression involves about 150 college undergrads as your study population popping bubble wrap and stuff like that.

Like it's still very early in its research, but it does make a lot of sense, you know, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's that's accurate. Yeah. Just take that and take that with a grain of salt, whatever that means. And it's also.

I'm not knocking the study, but it's also, you know, let's be honest, it's not the most important thing in the world.

No, no, it's interesting to understand it makes for good reading on an Internet article. Yeah, but it's not driving like it's not solving a problem, you know what I'm saying?

I suddenly feel like we're standing in the middle of a vast glass house and we have rocks in our hands right now.

Oh, boy, I think it's fun to talk about. I mean, that's what makes I mean, this is a perfect podcast fodder for sure.

But like, I'm curious if this could be applied at all.

I don't know. I think maybe it's one of those things where it's like now we understand that it's documented, it's understood to be we understand humans a little more and maybe it opens the door to some other thing that we realized was connected. Now there's value that you know. Yeah, but I totally agree with what you're saying.

Yeah. But I think you've put me in the other direction. Nobel Prize. Oh, good. Good to send it their way. OK, so you mentioned earlier about using the stuff to sell things, and that is for sure true. You can't I mean, you look at any Pixar or Disney cartoon or anime, certainly you're going to see round babies and you're going to see huge eyes when you see pamphlets that are trying to sell stuff or or try to get you to donate to an animal cause or a children's foundation, they're probably going to put a baby or a puppy on that cover that has the biggest, roundest face and eyes.

Yeah, it's manipulative, but used for good generally. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's almost like using music in the background of an ad, you know, like purposefully hijacking a very ancient neural pathway that basically all humans have to get an emotional response out of you, a positive emotional response. And it I have nothing to do with with what they're trying to sell. But you're you're now associating pleasurable, warm feeling with, you know, Mr. Sparkle dishwashing detergent.

Yeah. You know, when really it's just a joint venture of much more Officeworks and tomorrow, it's very heavy manufacturing concern, like when they've done they've done studies like anti-smoking campaigns for teenagers. Yeah. And they respond more to cartoon characters that are cute, which sounds a lot like Joe Camel, if you ask me.

It's like the opposite. Yeah, that's true. But it does make sense. Like a Tinas might respond to a list. Here is like a penguin in a jacket or a polar bear. Then, you know, some adult human like pointing their finger at you. Yeah.

Like John Houseman right through the teens don't smoke. So, yeah, it also makes you think, like, you know, since so many cute toys or so many toys are cute when you're buying like a plush animal has, are you responding almost in like an insane way to your cute caregiving response, just being manipulated and like you're going to take this stuffed animal home and give it care because it's just been activated in you? Is that really is that seems to be what's going on when you when you're when you buy like a toy like that?

I think so. That's interesting, because then, you know, if you see people walking around like that, you're like, oh, you've just been manipulated. Congratulations kind of thing. Yeah. But also you can make the case too. And I read a guy something by a guy named Gary Ginocchio, who is the Canada Research Chair in techno culture at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. And he argues that that same thing that the commodification of cute say like by Disney.

He also argues that National Geographic magazine was big into getting people in involved in caring about animals in nature. They really use cuteness, especially like the fifties and sixties. I guess that it informs our understanding of things in a very specific way, which is this thing is cute. It's like a toy to me. I want to pick it up and carry it around and love it and hug on it. But in doing that, you really miss out on a lot of the the individual personality of whatever that animal is like.

You like you trade respect for infantilism, right? Yeah. And like that really stood out to me because I have to remind myself that Momoh is like this sentient individual entity who deserves respect and to be treated with respect, not just picked up any time she you know, she looks at me a certain. Wayne sets off my cuteness response like I've really had to grapple with that and luckily, you mean like really aware of that because she has she's always been a very small person and she used to get picked up all the time.

So she's like identifies with mom on that level. And it's been like really an exercise in restraint. Sometimes it just be like, no, I've just got to treat my mom like she doesn't want to be picked up right now kind of thing, you know. Yeah, but I thought Kanaskie Junnosuke really made a good point that we we miss a lot of like what makes an animal, an animal in favor of just seeing it as something cute in kind of a plaything in a way.

Yeah. And like there is no clear reminder that, you know, I've always had dogs and multiple dogs and love dogs. But when you see a dog like, you know, go after a squirrel and catch it and eat it or something. These are the reminders like these are these are animals, you know, like the same cute dog will also, you know, eat poop out of. It's about if it's good. Right.

Or eat your face if you died on the couch and it was locked in the house in a second. Sure. So we probably shouldn't finish until we talk about coie culture. Yeah.

This is the Japanese culture that is. Well, this says it best. Maybe the greatest pop culture expression of cute. You think peacoat. You think like pop singers dressed as little sort of pigtailed schoolgirls. It's a very, very big trend in Japan. It's huge. Like everybody has a cute mascot. Hello. Kitty's everywhere. It's just enormous. And apparently it kind of like grew in evolved and morphed over time, starting with this student protest movement in the 60s where like the Japanese kids, like, just decided they didn't want to go to class anymore.

They sat around and read manga comic books instead and kind of regressed to back to childhood. And then they kind of developed in the 70s into a trend for cutesy, bubbly handwriting that led to Hello Kitty. And then weirdly, it also made an appearance as what is it, Buteyko women, which is very childlike. Women who adopted this this kind of demeanor to no one, cut off any sense of threat that they presented when they entered the workforce, but also to kind of keep unwanted advances from their male colleagues at bay to they they entered the workforce as if they were young kids, little girls, Gigli and all that kind of stuff.

And this is like a persona that they adopted that eventually became this trend, the cuteness trend that's like everywhere in Japan. I never thought about the bubble letters. That's so interesting. Yeah. Because I've always sort of wondered, like, why elementary school girls, it seems like, would write in those big, juicy round letters. Yeah, it makes sense. It does. But that was apparently work. Hawaii culture came from originally. Was the handwriting thing interesting.

Yeah, I was curious here at the end I was like, has science proven what the cutest animals are. Oh yeah. And I did find something from List Verse and Jonathan Cantor, the top ten cutest animals in the world, according to science. But I see nothing in the article about how science proved this, literally nothing. But I figured I'd read it just for fun. Number ten is most baby mammals. OK, number nine is the slow loris.

You see those things now, you should look at some of these, in fact, I'm going to go ahead and text you number one, OK, right now, because and I guess I'll just send it to you and Jerry, since she's on our most recent thread, she'll be like, what the heck is this? All right. Coming your way. So number eight is the meerkat, which I think meerkats look a little sinister personally. Yeah, I could see that because the like there they got the bandit masks on.

Yeah.

Number seven is the koala. Yeah. Did you just look this loris looks like now that's not a loris that I sent you.

Are you looking at a loris. Well what is this what I sent you. Yeah. Just put a pin in its number one, ok. Yeah I can see that. Number six is the flapjack in Dumbo octopus.

Oh, OK. Piglets, number five, uh, nach, the fennec fox number four. That's the fox with those huge ears. OK, you make those great sounds. Sure.

The red panda is number three, the panda bear, the white panda, black and white pandas. Nowhere on this list.

Weird. This guy is way off. This must have been a list from Jimmy Science, his roommate, according to Jimmy Science.

Yeah, I think you mean James B science. OK, number two, A sea otters. And then number one, I don't know how I've lived my whole life without knowing that this thing existed, but the Quokka. Q Okay. Oh my gosh.

From Australia, it's a small marsupial, same family as a kangaroo apparently in southwestern Australia. In that picture I sent you, my friend, just Google smiling. Quokka Yeah. And you'll see this one picture of this Quokka literally jumping hands out, smiling at the camera lens, like, give me a hug, like, give me a hug. This is and I think I mean, you know, they said it's because they look like they're smiling, obviously.

Right. Is one of the big reasons. But almost every picture you look at a Quokka, it's got this little smile. Yeah, it's unbelievable.

Hey, I have to say, based on the screenshot, you need to charge your phone soon. Yeah. And that was even earlier. So. Oh, God, I get that same stress because I'm I'm generally at least 50 percent guy. Yeah. And so when I see people do screen shots as that read. Yeah. Oh boy. I know. Stresses me out. I can't even take it. So to finish up Chuck that the converse of what you're talking about, the cutest animals, the fact that they exist also kind of implies that there are non cute animals that exist.

Yeah. That they're less likely to get our attention and as a result there is a kind of tongue in cheek. But I also get the impression kind of serious group called The Ugly Animal Preservation Society, whose mascot is the blobfish, which makes a lot of sense. And their slogan is, we can't all be pandas. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So they're looking out for the ugly animals that we're going to wipe out because they're not cute.

Well, I know that is a big deal when it comes to conservation, is that that people can conservationists have a much harder time getting money and stuff. I mean, we talked about it in our zoos episode. Yeah. That's why they they lead with giraffes and elephants and stuff like that.

Was that the episode? I know we talked about it before and they were like, look, man, just leave us alone. This is the important stuff because it saves the other stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That blobfish looks like I mean. Yeah. A good cute maybe. Yeah, Kimmo Kawaii Kawaii sounds familiar, that's probably because you heard it at the very beginning of the Gwen Stefani song Hollaback Girl. Oh really? Where she sees a bunch of Hard Yuku girls in Japan and goes, quite nice.

Yeah. That blobfish look like look like it's constantly saying, OK, you know, they should call it the E or fish or the blobfish definitely works. Oh man. Well since we have wrapped it up with the old blobfish, if you want to know more about the science of cute, just start looking at cute pictures of the Kawaoka. Sure. That's a great place to start.

And since Chuck said, sure, that means it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call this I'm getting called out here and it's something I haven't thought about. I got called out by a couple of people for different reasons for saying this phrase, you know, unless you live under a rock, the, you know, blank, uh, one person said, hey, that just makes me feel dumb because I didn't know about one of these things.

Sure. I think that's the point. Right. That's your intent. I don't want to make anyone feel bad.

Oh, so this is a different kind of response and well worth reading. Hey, guys, making my way through a backlog of log of episodes. And I notice the thing that seems to pop up from time to time in your descriptions of popular culture and products like hang gliding, Etch a Sketch and Rubik's Cube, you make comments like and if you don't know what one of these is or looks like, get out from under your rock and go look up a picture.

Someone who has been blind since birth, though my problem isn't that I've been living under a rock, but rather the pictures to me are worth zero words. Yeah. Really? Yeah, you got me good. I grew up in the eighties, so everyone had a Rubik's Cube and I played with my fair share of them, even though I couldn't solve them for many things in life that if I haven't physically touched it or had it described to me, I only have the faintest idea of what it looks like.

In fact, I was a music music education major in college, and it wasn't until my sophomore year at age 19 that I touched a brass instrument for the very first time. The French horn still fascinates me. I've enjoyed listening to your show for years and I've learned lots of visual information from you, from what dress look like to fashion choices of punk rockers. I wanted to make you aware of this, though. You can help people who can't look at pictures, whether we're blind or whether we're on the road driving in a truck.

We don't want to pull out our phones to look at pictures. Thanks for years of learning and laughter. Appreciate the work warmly, Ryan for Minneapolis and Ryan, I have nothing to say, but great point and I'll do better. Very nice check. I don't think there's anything else you could say. You know why? Because you're a good person and not a jerk. That's right.

And now I will try and describe things to the best of my ability, which I might not be great, but I think you did a good job with the Kawaoka OK description smiling. Wrote it. Yeah, it looks like it's smiling.

That's all you need to know. Yeah, that's great. Um, well, if you want to take Chuck or me to task, that's, there's not a lot of sport in there. But if you want to do it anyway, that's fine. You can send it to us via email, wrap it up and send it off to Stuff podcast and I heart radio dotcom.

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio is the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ever wonder what kind of job you would have if you were born in a different time? You're in luck because Jobs Elite is a new podcast that just may have an answer for you. I'm Helen Hong and I'm at Beith.

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