Subject: Cute may help us get acceptance of messages

From: "David C. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:44:59 -0800

This may be helpful to me in developing attractive pro-science, 
pro-evolution graphics to distribute.  They talk about persuasive 
messages about halfway through.

  - David

  The New York Times

January 3, 2006
The Cute Factor
By NATALIE ANGIER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 - If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, 
goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the 
National Zoo isn't enough to make you melt, then maybe the crush of his 
human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras and the heated 
gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

"Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!"

"How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big 
squeeze!"

"He's so fuzzy! I've never seen anything so cute in my life!"

A guard's sonorous voice rises above the burble. "OK, folks, five oohs 
and aahs per person, then it's time to let someone else step up front."

The 6-month-old, 25-pound Tai Shan - whose name is pronounced tie-SHON 
and means, for no obvious reason, "peaceful mountain" - is the first 
surviving giant panda cub ever born at the Smithsonian's zoo. And though 
the zoo's adult pandas have long been among Washington's top tourist 
attractions, the public debut of the baby in December has unleashed an 
almost bestial frenzy here. Some 13,000 timed tickets to see the cub 
were snapped up within two hours of being released, and almost 
immediately began trading on eBay for up to $200 a pair.

Panda mania is not the only reason that 2005 proved an exceptionally 
cute year. Last summer, a movie about another black-and-white charmer, 
the emperor penguin, became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of 
all time. Sales of petite, willfully cute cars like the Toyota Prius and 
the Mini Cooper soared, while those of noncute sport utility vehicles 
tanked.

Women's fashions opted for the cute over the sensible or glamorous, with 
low-slung slacks and skirts and abbreviated blouses contriving to 
present a customer's midriff as an adorable preschool bulge. Even the 
too big could be too cute. King Kong's newly reissued face has a 
squashed baby-doll appeal, and his passion for Naomi Watts ultimately 
feels like a serious case of puppy love - hopeless, heartbreaking, cute.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a 
wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make 
something look 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.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, 
harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely 
makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so 
pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without 
adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and 
gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

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.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to 
possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more 
italicized are the squeals provoked.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded 
over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts 
admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and 
demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. 
Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate 
with homeliness.

Observing that many Floridians have an enormous affection for the 
manatee, which looks like an overfertilized potato with a sock puppet's 
face, Roger L. Reep of the University of Florida said it shone by grace 
of contrast. "People live hectic lives, and they may be feeling 
overwhelmed, but then they watch this soft and slow-moving animal, this 
gentle giant, and they see it turn on its back to get its belly 
scratched," said Dr. Reep, author with Robert K. Bonde of "The Florida 
Manatee: Biology and Conservation."

"That's very endearing," said Dr. Reep. "So even though a manatee is 3 
times your size and 20 times your weight, you want to get into the water 
beside it."

Even as they say a cute tooth has rational roots, scientists admit they 
are just beginning to map its subtleties and source. 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, which 
could explain why everybody in the panda house wore a big grin.

At the same time, said Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art at the 
University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the rapidity and promiscuity of 
the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the 
angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived.

"Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, Let's not worry about 
complexities, just love me," said Dr. Dutton, who is writing a book 
about Darwinian aesthetics. "That's where the sense of cheapness can 
come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker 
that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow."

Quick and cheap make cute appealing to those who want to catch the eye 
and please the crowd. Advertisers and product designers are forever 
toying with cute cues to lend their merchandise instant appeal, mixing 
and monkeying with the vocabulary of cute to keep the message fresh and 
fetching.

That market-driven exercise in cultural evolution can yield bizarre if 
endearing results, like the blatantly ugly Cabbage Patch dolls, Furbies, 
the figgy face of E.T., the froggy one of Yoda. As though the original 
Volkswagen Beetle wasn't considered cute enough, the updated edition was 
made rounder and shinier still.

"The new Beetle looks like a smiley face," said Miles Orvell, professor 
of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. "By this point 
its origins in Hitler's regime, and its intended resemblance to a German 
helmet, is totally forgotten."

Whatever needs pitching, cute can help. A recent study at the Veterans 
Affairs Medical Center at the University of Michigan showed that high 
school students were far more likely to believe antismoking messages 
accompanied by cute cartoon characters like a penguin in a red jacket or 
a smirking polar bear than when the warnings were delivered unadorned.

"It made a huge difference," said Sonia A. Duffy, the lead author of the 
report, which was published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent 
Medicine. "The kids expressed more confidence in the cartoons than in 
the warnings themselves."

Primal and widespread though the taste for cute may be, researchers say 
it varies in strength and significance across cultures and eras. They 
compare the cute response to the love of sugar: everybody has sweetness 
receptors on the tongue, but some people, and some countries, eat a lot 
more candy than others.

Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in 
Japan, where it goes by the name "kawaii" and has infiltrated the most 
masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines 
on their dashboards. The police enliven safety billboards and wanted 
posters with two perky mouselike mascots, Pipo kun and Pipo chan.

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar 
of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly 
hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. "Cuteness is used to soften up 
the vertical society," he said, "to soften power relations and present 
authority without being threatening."

In this country, the use of cute imagery is geared less toward blurring 
the line of command than toward celebrating America's favorite 
demographic: the young. Dr. Orvell traces contemporary cute chic to the 
1960's, with its celebration of a perennial childhood, a refusal to 
dress in adult clothes, an inversion of adult values, a love of bright 
colors and bloopy, cartoony patterns, the Lava Lamp.

Today, it's not enough for a company to use cute graphics in its 
advertisements. It must have a really cute name as well. "Companies like 
Google and Yahoo leave no question in your mind about the youthfulness 
of their founders," said Dr. Orvell.

Madison Avenue may adapt its strategies for maximal tweaking of our 
inherent baby radar, but babies themselves, evolutionary scientists say, 
did not really evolve to be cute. Instead, most of their salient 
qualities stem from the demands of human anatomy and the human brain, 
and became appealing to a potential caretaker's eye only because infants 
wouldn't survive otherwise.

Human babies have unusually large heads because humans have unusually 
large brains. Their heads are round because their brains continue to 
grow throughout the first months of life, and the plates of the skull 
stay flexible and unfused to accommodate the development. Baby eyes and 
ears are situated comparatively far down the face and skull, and only 
later migrate upward in proportion to the development of bones in the 
cheek and jaw areas.

Baby eyes are also notably forward-facing, the binocular vision a likely 
legacy of our tree-dwelling ancestry, and all our favorite Disney 
characters also sport forward-facing eyes, including the ducks and mice, 
species that in reality have eyes on the sides of their heads.

The cartilage tissue in an infant's nose is comparatively soft and 
undeveloped, which is why most babies have button noses. Baby skin sits 
relatively loose on the body, rather than being taut, the better to 
stretch for growth spurts to come, said Paul H. Morris, an evolutionary 
scientist at the University of Portsmouth in England; that lax packaging 
accentuates the overall roundness of form.

Baby movements are notably clumsy, an amusing combination of jerky and 
delayed, because learning to coordinate the body's many bilateral sets 
of large and fine muscle groups requires years of practice. On starting 
to walk, toddlers struggle continuously to balance themselves between 
left foot and right, and so the toddler gait consists as much of lateral 
movement as of any forward momentum.

Researchers who study animals beloved by the public appreciate the human 
impulse to nurture anything even remotely babylike, though they are at 
times taken aback by people's efforts to identify with their preferred 
species.

Take penguins as an example. Some people are so wild for the creatures, 
said Michel Gauthier-Clerc, a penguin researcher in Arles, France, "they 
think penguins are mammals and not birds." They love the penguin's 
upright posture, its funny little tuxedo, the way it waddles as it 
walks. How like a child playing dress-up!

Endearing as it is, Dr. Gauthier-Clerc explained that the apparent 
awkwardness of the penguin's march had nothing to do with clumsiness or 
uncertain balance. Instead, he said, penguins waddle to save energy. A 
side-to-side walk burns fewer calories than a straightforward stride, 
and for birds that fast for months and live in a frigid climate, every 
calorie counts.

As for the penguin's maestro garb, the white front and black jacket 
suits its aquatic way of life. While submerged in water, the penguin's 
dark backside is difficult to see from above, camouflaging the penguin 
from potential predators of air or land. The white chest, by contrast, 
obscures it from below, protecting it against carnivores and allowing it 
to better sneak up on fish prey.

The giant panda offers another case study in accidental cuteness. 
Although it is a member of the bear family, a highly carnivorous clan, 
the giant panda specializes in eating bamboo.

As it happens, many of the adaptations that allow it to get by on such a 
tough diet contribute to the panda's cute form, even in adulthood. 
Inside the bear's large, rounded head, said Lisa Stevens, assistant 
panda curator at the National Zoo, are the highly developed jaw muscles 
and the set of broad, grinding molars it needs to crush its way through 
some 40 pounds of fibrous bamboo plant a day.

When it sits up against a tree and starts picking apart a bamboo stalk 
with its distinguishing pseudo-thumb, a panda looks like nothing so much 
like Huckleberry Finn shucking corn. Yet the humanesque posture and paws 
again are adaptations to its menu. The bear must have its "hands" free 
and able to shred the bamboo leaves from their stalks.

The panda's distinctive markings further add to its appeal: the black 
patches around the eyes make them seem winsomely low on its face, while 
the black ears pop out cutely against the white fur of its temples.

As with the penguin's tuxedo, the panda's two-toned coat very likely 
serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it helps a feeding bear blend 
peacefully into the dappled backdrop of bamboo. On the other, the sharp 
contrast between light and dark may serve as a social signal, helping 
the solitary bears locate each other when the time has come to find the 
perfect, too-cute mate.

     * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company