You’re probably concerned about the plight of polar bears. You may reach for your wallet when you see a panda on a fundraising flyer. But have you given much thought to the blobfish?
More often than not, our reactions to animals are not very rational. Regardless of the threats to their survival, we love and often try to help animals we think are beautiful or cute. Others, not so much.
People who raise money for conservation know this. That’s why the World Wildlife Fund has a panda on its logo and why certain animals are said to have “donor appeal.”
Human-Animal Relationships
Animals we like tend to be big, furry, and have forward-facing eyes. We’re particularly fond of animals that look like human babies, with big heads (relative to their bodies), chubby faces, and big round eyes.
Konrad Lorenz, a 20th-century Austrian ethologist, identified this set of characteristics and called it Kindchenschema, or in English, baby schema. These characteristics are sometimes called “baby releasers” because they stimulate caretaking in adults.
When you encounter baby schema — we’ll just call it cuteness — in a creature, you might find yourself cooing and babbling, with a strong desire to cuddle and protect that creature.
Read More: Here Are 6 of the Ugliest Animals in the World
Our Brains on Animals
There’s biology behind this response. A few years ago, a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences looked into how cuteness can “hijack our brains,” as the study’s authors put it in an article in The Conversation describing their work.
“When we encounter something cute, it ignites fast brain activity in regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex,” the authors wrote, “which are linked to emotion and pleasure. It also attracts our attention in a biased way: babies have privileged access to entering conscious awareness in our brains.”
Other research has found that cuteness can stimulate hormones, such as oxytocin, a hormone involved in the mother-infant bond and social bonds more generally, and dopamine, which gives you a surge of pleasure that rewards and reinforces a given behavior.
Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, is one of the leading researchers in the field of human-animal relationships. He explains that the evolutionary reason for the cuteness response is pretty clear. Humans are born virtually helpless and need adults to care for them, often at great cost in time and resources, if they are to make it past the rather lengthy human childhood.
“Individuals who were responsive to baby-like features in their infants would care for them more, and those infants would have higher chances of survival and ultimately reproduction,” he says.
But why are we melting into puddles of parental love over a baby seal? A puppy? Pictures of kittens? Those instincts that are so helpful in making sure we care for our own babies can misfire, Herzog explains.
“I think that pet keeping is, in part, a misfiring of these same parental instincts that attract us to animals that have baby-like features,” Herzog says. Even enjoying kitten memes, it turns out, has an evolutionary basis.
But What About Animals That Aren’t Cute?
Our preference for cuteness has a downside. Not all animals that need our care are cute. Simon Watt is trying to address that problem. Watt is an evolutionary biologist and science communicator who uses every method available — including comedy — to educate people about science and natural history. He’s the wit behind the only partly tongue-in-cheek Ugly Animal Society.
“If you're a tiger or an elephant or any of the charismatic megafauna, you’re far more likely to have PhD students clamoring to study you,” Watt says. “Scientists write more papers about these animals than about invertebrates and things under the sea. I thought, ’This is wrong,’ and I had to find a way of dealing with it.”
And so the Ugly Animal Society was born, complete with the aesthetically challenged blobfish, once voted the world’s ugliest animal, adorning its webpage. “The society is not a real society, but we've kind of accidentally become a real one,” he adds.
The idea may be to use fun and goofiness to bring attention to oft-neglected species, but it’s serious work. Though he makes a lot of jokes about our affection for pandas, Watt, who is an ambassador for The World Land Trust, stresses that he doesn’t want to insult anybody who’s trying to do good.
Still, he says, “We need to look into the other animals that are not as well studied. We need to consider the ecosystem as a whole. You can’t save the world unless you understand it.”
It seems that saving the world might require making an effort to get beyond our cuteness response — or at least not let it limit us. We can give ugly animals a little love, too.
Read More: With a Comically Sad Face, the Blobfish Could be the Ugliest Animal in the World
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
The Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Lorenz’s classic ‘baby schema’: a useful biological concept?
Trends in Cognitive Science. On Cuteness: Unlocking the Parental Brain and Beyond
Frontiers. Pet Face: Mechanisms Underlying Human-Animal Relationships
The Nobel Prize. Konrad Lorenz
Hormones and Behavior. Facing infant cuteness: How nurturing care motivation and oxytocin system gene methylation are associated with responses to baby schema features
The Conversation. How cute things hijack our brains and drive behaviour
Trends in Cognitive Science. On Cuteness: Unlocking the Parental Brain and Beyond
Mental Health America. What is Dopamine?
Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.
