The Science of Cute

What does that label mean within our culture? Well, I think the United States it's more of an outward appearance, whereas in Japanese culture it is sort of this whole industrial complex of absolute cuteness. Yes, yes, definitely in Japan, kauai is big business and has been for for decades now. Um, but certainly cute holds a lot of power here in the States as well throughout most of the rest of

the world. I mean, even just looking around in this room, we can see some little bits of cute peking their way, and there's a there's a wooden monkey over there on Noel's desk. There's Pablo Picasso in his underwear. Picture of Pablo Picasso is underway. Yes, I don't know how cute that is, but but the monkey's cute to eliminate extent,

the dinosaur is cute. And if you go around our death, like any workplace, you're gonna find various totems of cute, various little, uh little icons of cuteness that just some degree empower the individual who has it. That's right. So we are going to explore this concept of kauai e and we're gonna do it through a couple of different vectors here, one of which is, of course, uh, one of the big exports of the Internet, and I'm not

talking about porn, but the other thing cats cats. Yes, yes, So it should come as no surprise anyone that, of course the Internet is full of cat videos, cat photos, cat memes, images, gifts, you name it. I mean, in any given day, you're probably bombarded with at least two or three of these things, right, and if you act actively seeking them out, if you're actively consuming them, then there's no end in sight. You could get on a kick one day and just keep going that you starve

to death. You could you would just fall down that cat wormhole and and you're right, you can fill your head with with all these sorts of images. And actually, there is an artificial neural network that Google's ex Laboratory and Stanford University have been working on. And again, this is a large scale neural network. It's distributed across sixteen thousand process of course, and researchers trained models with more

than one billion connections. And they found that this network, when it sort of ran off on its own, it learned how to identify a cat after a week of watching YouTube videos. That is how prevalent this subject is on the internet. Yeah, they fit at random thumbnails of images, each one extracted from ten million YouTube big eos. And it ends up having to basically invent the concept of the cat in processing all of this data, figuring out right, what's at the heart of this? What is this about?

What is what? What? What is all this data telling me? It is telling me this is a cat, this is the form of the cat, and uh and and then and then everything else stems from that. And so you have someone like philosopher Dan Dennett, who who's talking about these sort of super normal stimuli, and he's talking about

super normal stimuli like chocolate cake. He's saying that there are certain things in our environment that we see that really get us ramped up, and that cats, babies, these all maybe the sort of super stimuli that works UM

on this sort of evolution and instinctual preference. So if you look at a chocolate cake, for instance, Um, that is a high energy food, right, You like the chocolate cake not because it's chocolate cake, but because you know that it's going to be a huge shot of glucose, and that you know, from an evolutionary perspective, that would be helpful for us to have stores with that, right, Yes, because in the ancient past, of course, a big chocolate

cake was hard to come by, or certainly that much sugar, that much energy in one place was hard to come by. You had to jump on it. And uh, it's the chocolate cake example is great too because if anyone remembers back to our episodes on decision fatigue UM and in neural load and how that how we carry that through the day. The experiments that studied it, Uh, most of the time they seem to incorporate chocolate cake in one form another, using that as the temptation as to your

to your willpower to your your problem solving ability. Let's see what happens when we throw a chocolate cake in your direction. Not literally, uh though that would be awesome as well, but but we'll put it in your vicinity and see how it affects your brain power and low behold, it just really tinkered with people's ability to think rationally. Yeah, because suddenly I have to at least resist it. And in a way, it's like I have to fight that

chocolate cake. It's like it's like you're going through a dungeon and you're trying to get to the treasure. Then you have to fight a troll along the way. It's the same thing, except the battles taking place inside your mind as you try to resist the irresistible glucose temptation of the cake. So Dannatt would say that a super normal stimuli for cuteness, of course, would be babies. He says, it's important that we love babies that will not be

put off by saying messy diapers. He says, so babies have to attract our affection in our nurturing, and they do. And so that's when you begin to really look at not just babies, but cats and puppies and really anything that embodies this idea of innocence and vulnerability and and this sort of parental instinct that we'll talk a little

bit more about. But this is this idea that cats perhaps have arrested our attention because of this instinct because they look like babies essentially, and then play it up to as we've discussed before, crying in a way that mimics the cries of a baby, et cetera. Yes, now I wanted to mention this because we are going to go dive into this kawaii or going to dive more into cats and the culture of cats on the internet.

But there's something called cute aggression, and I think, I don't know, part of me is sort of, you know, one eyebrow raised about this study and it just sounds like a tumbler page. It's actually a study actually theory. Yeah. So Rebecca Dyer, she's a grad student psychology at Yale University, took one nine people and she had them look at

pictures of animals. The categories were cute, funny, and neutral photos actually specifically of puppies, and then the participants rated how they felt about the pictures agreeing or disagreeing with statements like I just can't handle it, meaning the cuteness um, or whether whether or not it made them want to squeeze something, or if they were seized with the impulse to vocalize after seeing one of these pictures like so cute. So researchers found that the cute or the animal, the

more aggressive the response. Okay, okay, So now they follow up with a non verbal study and participants. Participants are given bubble wrap and they're told to just go to town with it, okay, and they watch a slide show of cute and then funny and then neutral pictures of animals, and then lo and behold. Which you find is that more bubbles were popped during the cute slide shows as opposed to the funny pictures of animals or the neutral pictures of animals. Now, the data is not that crazy.

I mean, we're talking about hundred and twenty pops for the cuteness um, eight pops for the funny, and only one hundred or excuse me, and one hundred for the neutral. So you know, the data Here's not like putting this this strong information out there to say like people are

just bursting with cute aggression. And you know, but they are saying, Rebecca Dye or at least is saying it could be the sort of pent up frustration at not being able to reach through those photos and cuddle that baby or that puppy because you just want to touch it, you don't want to bite it. Well, and that's what we've talked about the before. How how sometimes there are these there are people who will say that baby is so cute, I just want to eat it. Yeah, and

on some level, you you actually do. On some level, you're being fooled into into equating the baby's cuteness and the face of the baby, the shape of the baby, the baby nous of the creature. Equating it with something you would actually gorge on is found in the barest, which is kind of awful. Yeah. Alright, well, on that note, maybe we should take a break here and when we get back we'll get more into this idea of quite

all right, we're back. You know, another thing about that study, I had never heard of a study using the bubble wrap uh method before. I really hope that become standardized to the point where we see movies about serial killers where like a potential serial killer is being forced to look at, you know, accident photos gets a rise out

of him. And so it's like, you know, and Anthony Hopkins Hannibal like characters sitting there with the grim face, watching grim footage and then popping bubble rap, and it just becomes really so much a part of how we determine unconscious thoughts that even the CIA begins to use it, right, just just orders with like vast reams of the stuff. Yeah, and then people are probably more willing participants because who doesn't love to pop bubble wrap? Everyone? Everyone loves it,

even dogs love it. Sure it's not as fine, all right. Kawaii. Um we we touched on it at the beginning of

the episode, but I kind of see it. This is very reductionist because it really we could do an entire podcast on Japanese culture in kawaii, but um, it's sort of this Hello Kitty ization is certainly the the easiest example and certainly the most widespread example of of Japanese culture Kawaii cute culture because it's it's everywhere now, and it's it's it's the big eyes, it's the cute creature and it and it also has this sort of Japanese

school girl quality to it. And then that's, according to some cultural historians, that's kind of the the origin of the Kauaii movement in Japan anyway, that it you go back to the nineteen seventies, you find this kitten writing, this cute handwriting they call it among schools, right because

it wasn't really all that readaful. I mean, it got, you know, to the point where it's just big round characters and faces and stars and uh and the and the teacher who was saying, no, this is not actual writing. But then it blows up. It starts showing up in comic I mean not in common boost been magazines, but then ultimately in Magna and other forms, and eventually becomes this huge industry with stuff like Hello Kitty, which is just all over the world and and and attached to

so many different products. Yeah, and if you look really deeply into kauai, you will begin to see that it's not just the products the clothing, um even food items, or even some of the logos that are on airplanes in some um government entities, but it's also behavior and mannerism among both genders. And it really is this preoccupation with um not just cuteness, but youth and innocence. So

it's this, uh, sort of an arrested development. I look at it that way, not the TV show, but in terms of, you know, trying to stave off aging and all of the sort of responsibility and perhaps the less fun aspects of life as you get older. Yeah, and then probably encapsulates a lot of nostalgia as well, because you grow older, you end up still catching attaching these cute icons in this qualification of just about every aspect of life, and therefore you keep it kind of tethered

to youth and tethered to youth culture. You know what's interesting about that too, is that if you seize onto this idea of kai and you see them to this idea of embodying these aspects of cuteness and big eidness and innocence, then perhaps in a way you're thinking to yourself on a subconscious level, at least you know, I will be more protected out there in society, which then brings up this whole idea of you know, how do we really how much of this parental response is responsible

for our behavior in the way that we interact with things that are cute. Now, another bit of Japanese cuteness that instantly comes to mind is the the lucky cat. If you find all you find it all over Asia, and you you find it increasingly everywhere in the United States as well. Of course, the little generally like a gold plastic cat, big eyes and it's it's waving its little paw in the air. Uh. These are officially called

maneki nicko or beckoning cats. And I was looking up some stuff back because I'm well, how does that tie into cute culture? Because as I suspected, that's older in its roots than the Hello Kitty. It dates back to the the Edo period, which was between a sixteen o three and eighteen sixties seven. Uh, And you know, it's

just sort of picked up steam over time. So even though we look at the kitten writing in the seventies and and the rise of Hello Kitty is sort of the real um pivotal aspects of Hawaii, I feel like that the roots were already there, if if nowhere else in the presence of cats. I think you're right now.

I have this idea of you know, the thousands of years from now, well people look back at you know, sort of a saying, oh, the Ming dynasty thing, you know, the rise of the Hello Kiddy dynasty, Because that really

is how pervasive kauai is. And I think in the United States here were we have flavors of it um and you know, just look around, as you say, like, you know, we look around our office and we can see that it's it's um interwoven into the way that we decorate or we perceive certain aspects we have our life. At least two adult members of the staff who are Disney fanatics, and there's a lot of kauai tied up there. And again, just about every other death has some sort

of token, some sort of little bit of kauai. I feel like if you look closely enough, if you root through their stuff, I mean really get in there and in their privacy, you'll find some bit of cute that is keeping them going. And that sounds kind of specific. What have you found? Oh, all sorts of stuff. I'll

show you later. I have a box. Okay, So you're probably wondering to yourself, are there any studies that can support this cuteness, that can kind of give us a better idea of why we react to this stuff the way we do. Of course there is because you know what we're talking about cute. We're talking about the way that of kitten's face is cute to us because it is reminiscent of the baby's face. And then what happens when we look at the baby, right, that's the question. Well,

there have been studies that have looked at that. We have the technology, of course to look inside the brain to see how what kind of neural activity is going on when we do different things. And there was there's one particular study that we're looking at here, uh and this was this involved the use of a meg scanner and they were looking at parental responses to both puppy faces and baby faces and then unfamiliar adult faces. Right, yes, Okay.

The really startling thing about this study is that when participants looking at all of these pictures within one seventh of a second, just a split second, literally, the medial orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in emotional responses, lit up like a pinball machine when people look at infant and puppy faces, but was pretty, you know, relatively silent

when adult faces showed up. So kringele Bach Morton Kringelbach, who ran the study calls this the parental instinct, and he says these responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive. That's his idea about it. Yeah, because we're talking about middleseconds here. We're talking about just an instant of seeing that baby face,

that puppy face, and you are suddenly pacified. You suddenly you're maybe put out of an aggressive spirit or irritated spirit, and you have to somehow help the poor larval human or dog. Yeah. And the thing is that it even goes beyond visual processing, because people who are blowing from birth have the same areas activated in their brains when they hear the name of animals. So the concept of animals or how we've painted them and language just goes

far beyond just pictures. Here. The idea is really standing in for um, the experience. So that study makes a lot of sense. I mean again, it just ties in directly to the way we look at look at an infant, at a kitten, at a puppy and uh and and how we instantly want to care for it on some level. And I feel like we all buy into that really easily. But here's another idea that two twelve Japanese study looked at,

and this one was published in the Plos One. They were asking, well, if I look at something cute, how does it affect my attentiveness? Which which that question makes me think of all these things that we were We surround ourselves with these icons of cute, Like the cute little lamp that I have on my desk. It's like a little face um that I got an I kea years ago. What happens when I look at that? Is it making me more relax? Is it making me more atentive?

Is it a just a distraction? Is all this cutest a distraction? Well, in this study they looked into this. They took participants and they viewed animal images and then they tested them to see how they performed on various tasks, and they found that participants who viewed infant animal images, ones that were rated particularly cute, they were able to perform pass better than those who viewed images of boring

adult animals. So it's interesting, right, because you're like, well, is it really possible that if I look at a cute object or a cute picture that I'll be able to better? You know, concentrate on the task before me. But I would indeed hang in there as the cute cat hanging from the branch. I would want to to to convey to you. I like, how you get that?

That was nice stuff? Um. But the thing is is that each group of participants consisted of less than fifty university students, and I think they did three different versions of these attention tests. And then all of these fifty university students were between the ages of eighteen and twenty two. And so this is also taking play in Japanese culture, where you know that the kawaii effect is much more pronounced, which leads some people to say, perhaps there's not really

that much evidence here that cuteness could bolster your attentiveness. Yeah, because if this held true, you would just want to cuteify everything. You'd want a little cute faces and animals just crawling all over just everything in your work life, everything at home, just until you're just there's just an overdose of cute all the time, just to keep you attentive. And I have to say that might be distracting at that point. Yeah, alright, so what about cuteness and a robot?

And I'm not talking about you, Arnie. Sorry, but I'm talking about Kismut the robot. And we've actually met Kismut before here on, at least in the episodes that we've described. Kismutt is robot that has been used at M I T and it is used to figure out sort of the psychological ramifications of interactions between humans and robots, specifically children. It kind of looks like a skinless robot Magua or Furby. Yeah, yeah,

Ferby definitely. It's got the furry ears, it's got huge eyes, and it can make a lot of distinctive um faces that that interact with the person. Yeah, and it works. Uh. I think it works really well because it's not it's not an attempted to human face, so you don't actually get into that possibility of uncanny Valley. It's instead this this non human but but it that it has human qualities to it, and then it is successfully making all

these various faces and conveying emotion. At the bottom of this, there's just cuteness. That's what reigns supreme about this robot um other than its ability to interact with humans. So what do you do? You take this robot and you insert it into a study, which is headed up by Terry Burnham at Harvard University along with Brian Hair. They pitted nine volunteers against each other anonymously in games where they had to donate money or withhold. It's sort of

the classic scenario we've seen over and over again. They can donate it into a communal pot and that would yield the most money, but only if other people donated to So the researchers split the group into two. Half made their choices undisturbed at computer screens, while the other

half were faced with the photo of this absolute adorable kisman. Now, the players who gazed at Kismut gave thirty more to the pot than others, and Vernam and Hare believed that at some subconscious level they were aware of being watched, or they sort of took that as being watched just looking at this photo. Um, but it may have something also to do with our brain kind of carrying out this decision making with this cute, this representation of cuteness

in front of us. Yeah, because how hard and selfish can you be in the presence of like a really cute kitten or an adorable baby. Not so much in even in the processing of it of thinking thinking, oh, this is cute, and you know that melts my heart

a little bit. But in that those micro sect that we talked about, of seeing this cute image and that, you know, against every fiber in your your your body, any defense you may have you may have up against that cuteness and against the idea of giving your money away or or or or letting your your temper go down a bit, it kind of creeps in past all

those defenses and deactivates you. Well, what I love too, is this idea that you could manipulate altruistic behavior with a pair of fake eyeballs, right just staring at you, adorable fake eyeballs. All right, Well, we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about Kauai and a little bit

more about cats. All right, we're back. Okay. So there is a wonderful article from Wired magazine called In Search of the Living, purring, singing Heart of the Online Cat Industrial Complex. Uh. The author, Gideon Lewis Krause, cites a couple of different studies to try to explain why cats

rule the Internet. And it's very interesting. Yeah, it is a very long discussion of the power of cats, the power of feelines, but it is I would say it's must read for anyone who is a self aware cat person because she really gets into how we interact with the feelines, how the feelines to limited extent and interact with us, and how this becomes a metaphor for the

way we approach life itself. Yeah, and if you're very interested in Japanese culture, this is also a great way to sort of plunge in and see how that's played out. The first study that was mentioned in this article is a study of internet habits of two hundred and six

teams or a University of Science and Technology students. Now of these students were deemed depressed after they were being after they were surveyed, so there's this sort of you know, pat standard survey to assess levels of depression that was administered to them. So they figured out that, you know, within the sample size of these people are depressed. So

they found two things in this Internet usage UM. By the way, they also had access to the amount of UM activity they had online, not specifically what sights they went to, but the kind of activity like for instance, file sharing, checking their email, surfing, the way of looking at images, looking at videos. Yeah, and so to findings in general, the more participant score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included, uh, those

features as you say. So there was a lot of file sharing, high levels of that, especially with music and movies. And second, they found patterns of Internet usage that were statistically high among people with depressive symptoms compared with those without the symptoms. So, for example, people with depressive symptoms tend to engage in a lot of email usage, so they were sending emails right and left and um. This correlated with some research that was done by psychologist Janet

Moorehan Martin, and Phyllis Schumacher. They found that frequent checking of email rate may relate to high levels of anxiety, and then of course that correlates to depressive symptoms. Well, I can definitely see where checking your email all the time would be depressing, because that's where we get our bills these days. That's where bad news is just as likely to come in via email as it is to come in over the phone. Yeah, and I think it's you know, just the the act doing that over and

over again, sort of bullies. This underlying anxiety, Yes, that is at the root of all of this, and so, um, the study is really interesting. I won't go into all the different points that correlated with depressive symptoms, but those are just a couple of the highlights. Um. Lewis Crofts, the the author of this article I'm Wired, then looked at this other study because he felt like these two

kind of dovetailed together really nicely. Because first you have the study of just you know, if you're if you're depressive, then perhaps you're a higher user of the Internet, or you you're watching more videos and possibly suggested in this article, you're seeking out more cat videos. You're seeing now more cute videos. Are You're going to cute overload to get

that dose of cute fluffiness into your life. So he says, you know that they did not know what exactly the content was, but you know, it stands to reason that cats would be part of some of that, all right. So the second study, which is called Factors Influencing the Temporal Patterns of dietic behaviors and Interactions between domestic cats and their owners. The conclusion quote that the higher the proportion of all successful intents to interact with the cat

that were due to the cat. The longer was the duration of the interactions. So he says that, in other words, your cat will like you best if you pretend that you don't desperately want to play with it. I love this study even has not one a prize with the ignobles it should. I mean, it's a very interesting study and a revealing study, but it reveals something that scientifically

that cat owners pretty much already know that. You bring somebody into the house who's allergic to the cat, who who who does not like the cat, That's who the cat is going to insist on walking on and climbing up on and rubbing against and everything else under the sun. You bring in a toddler who wants nothing more than to pet the cat for hours and hours on end, the cat is going to avoid that child like the plague.

That's right, and it's great that there's finally a study that says this is this is what's happening here, because all of us have suspected it. Um. The other part of the study was that the more neurotic cat owner, the more desperate for fuzzy comfort and nesley security and unconditional affection, which is essentially what we were just talking about.

And then of course the brief of the interactions. So I think it's just important to state that as the owner and and and the cat that dynamic because Lewis Kraft says, hey, what do we do on the interner that all day long we like things and then we sit around and we wait for things that we do to be liked, And he says that we check all the analytics and all the retreats, and this is where those cats come in, because cats essentially are us trying to gain approval. Yes, so there is huge symbol of

these interactions that we have between us. Yeah, when the cat shows you attention, you have you sort of won that attention. You have to you have to continually rewin that cat's attention because otherwise, because at any given point a day, okay will be like, hey, I really want to leave the house and never see you again. Is that cool? Uh? And then I will happen if you

allow it to. And then if the cat remains in your house, you have to you have to sort of play it cool or you sometimes you have to coax the cat and to get the reward of the cute face, of the warmth against your body, the furry feeling of holding the cat, and of course the health ben offense. They've been numerous studies that have looked at the health ben if it's of cat ownership. But then again, the more you chase after it, the more you try and make it your own, the more likely that have penis

is going to crawl under the bed and hide from you. Yeah, And it's sort of like if if you seek out these pictures and these videos of cats, then on some level you're you're courting approval from them. And it says, you know, if you see a picture of a cat and says, oh hi, it's not you know, it's the cat's not saying oh, hello, hello, look at me, the cat saying oh I didn't see standing there. It's that sort of attitude. And so I love how he weaves

all of this together, this internet usage. So in that sense, be the Lucky Cat is really a cat video that takes back to the Edo period because it's a beckoning cat. The cat is waving, the cat is saying hi, hello, and and actually acknowledging you, even though it's just a mechanical cat or or just even an unmoving uh image of a cat. It's waving to you, it's beckoning to you, and therefore it's approving of you. Messengers like the unrequited love.

And finally you have this cat saying yes, come here, I will fold you into my arms. And then you have somebody that got frustrated and said, forget it. I'm not going to try and len these cats approval anymore. I'm gonna make myself one out of stone, or I'm gonna make one that actually mechanically waves at me, and that will do it. It would be my cat gollumn, yes,

cat go yeah. Um. Clay Sharkey has an interesting TED talk and he talks about something called cognitive surplus, and then he weaves that into l O L cats and he says that cognitive surplus is the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global projects. So he uses l O L cuts as an example. Right, a lot of people from all over the world contributing to this one effort essentially just to make all of this laugh, which is a great thing.

And he says that um, it is made up of two things this cognitive surplus. He says that it's the world's free time and talents. And he says, the world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit these shared projects. I kind of I don't know where he came up with that, staff, but that's

a lot. And then he says that, um, you know, we as a collective power of world changing behavior, if we can do the ll L cats that we could potentially with that those trillions of hours actually committed to something that is meaningful, I mean beyond making all of us laugh, because that is meaningful. So he's saying, hey, if you've got time to ll okay, you've got time to cure cancer. I think he's saying, we can all maybe not cure cancer, but you know, we could all

freak at least love each other a little more. We could love each other a little bit more. We could pool our efforts to try to tackle certain problems that would rely upon individual efforts, um to to give their talents to this one thing. It's an interesting concept. It's

very ted. It is it's very ted. Yeah, and it does make me think again of cuteness as a as an icon, cuteness as as an object of worship, a little adorable cat made out of plastic that you put on your desk and in a sense, you pray to every time you look at it. You're you maybe not, you're actually not Actually you're not actually saying any kind of a prayer, but you are looking to it and investing some level of cognitive energy into it and expecting

to gain from it. There you go. I mean, this is as good as it gets when it comes to trying to explain the love of cats, the obsession with cats on the internet, and then touching on this idea of kauai and uh, the ways in which it colors our perception. All right, So there you have it, kauaite cute. Um. I'm sure everyone has some little bit of insight on this to share, and we would love to hear about it.

We'd love to know what is the little icon of cute that empowers you throughout the day, or what is the what is a little bit of cuteness that you absolutely detest and uh and would I would actually interfere with your productivity during the course of the day. Let us know about that as well. You can find us in all the usual places. Stuff to about your Mind dot com as the mothership, but we're all so on Tumbler, Facebook and Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Blower Mind, Stuff Show

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