Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam. Here, if you can think of a terrifying monster from popular culture, I can show you a version of that monster designed to be cute. From Freddy Krueger and Godzilla to Cathulu and Pennywise the Dancing Clown. We seem determined to transform our monsters into plushies, cartoon characters, and other cuti's. But why let's take a second to
discuss what monsters and cute's actually are. You can go down the rabbit hole on the cognitive origin of monsters, but essentially, a monster is an unreal creature that's awesome in size or novel in its chimerical combination of natural forms. It threatens and terrifies us even as it relates some lesson or understanding of the world around us. For instance, a werewolf combines human and lupine characteristics, but also relays
a message about the dual nature of human beings. We are both beast and something that aspires to be more. Acuteness is easy year to nail down, if only because it's so rooted in conditioned responses to human infants. The features that we call cute in babies, big eyes, fat cheeks are simply the ones that hijack human attention and response. After all, the infant is the fruit of our genetic programming.
We can't help but attend to its needs. This view of cuteness falls in line with Charles Darwin's theory that natural selection favors creatures that, in infancy possess features that cause adults to protect them. Austrian pathologist Conrad Lawrence went on to outline these specific triggers involved, including short, thick extremities, and clumsy movements in addition to the big eyes and chubby cheeks. To what degree does cuteness hijack our senses?
Though scientists have observed one seventh of a second response time and adults to unfamiliar infant faces, but not to adult faces. Japanese study found that people who viewed images of infant animals performed tasks better than those who viewed images of adult animals. In other words, cute stimuli improved
performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness. Were simply hardwired to become careful guardians when cutei's called to us, and that bleeds over into inhuman cute's as well the kittens, puppies, and cartoon characters. Maybe those cute kitten posters in the office actually serve a purpose after all. At this point, it's easy to think of cuteness and monstrosity as separate entities, but the two states may exist upon the same spectrum
of attention grabbing stimuli. Imagine a slider mechanism in a program or video game. One direction takes you into the realm of disgusting terror, and the other is a one way ticket to cute town. Social scientist Maya Jejovska Brechinska wrote a paper on this subject, Monstrous Cute Notes on the ambivalent nature of cuteness. In it, she argues that the cute and the monstrous exist in a single dimension, and that there is a tipping point as to how
far you can push that cute slash monstrous slider. She writes that this spectrum quote works inevitably as a sort of pendulum, swinging to and fro, and thus being able to play its role only up to a certain point, where the sweetness becomes a mock and a pitiful or ironic ulter ego of itself. In other words, it's possible to push cuteness so far that it becomes sickening. If we're to push too far in the other direction, arguably the monstrous simply becomes ridiculous. Of course, in either case,
individual thresholds to cute slash monster overload will vary. Monsters and cuts may stand at opposing exaggerations on the same slider a visual stimuli. But why would we move that slider to begin with? In making our monsters cute, we diminish the underlying natural or cultural horrors that they entail. In making the cute monstrous, we also dilute its brain
hijacking potency. This might also entail what psychologist Oriented Arragon calls a dimorphous expression, in which an overly positive emotion produces a negative reaction. If you've ever felt the desire to pinch and overly cute into kitten, then you've felt this phenomenon firsthand. When cute gets tough to handle, a dash of horror balances it out. It would seem we create monsters for a variety of reasons, to entertain, to warn,
or to chastise and thrill. We turn them cute to dull their power or repurpose them for commercial gain, But the slider can't always run back in the opposite direction. We can only rob our monsters of their powers for so long. Today's episode was written by Robert Lamb and
produced by Tyler Clang. To hear more about the monstrosity slash cuteness spectrum, look for the episode of that title on Robert's podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, And, of course, for more on this and lots of other topics so sweet you could eat them up, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.