Cuteness. It’s an amazingly powerful force in the human psyche, and yet you hardly ever hear it mentioned. It’s the sort of thing that is so absolutely fundamental to how we see the world that we don’t even notice it or think about it much. We notice it about as much as fish notice the water in which they live. It’s easily as strong a force in how we think and what we do as our oft-ballyhooed (and booed) sex drives, and yet, because its manifestations are considered almost entirely socially acceptable and even beneficial, it has somewhat perversely escaped attention.

Think about it : the search for pictures which activate our “cute” response is second only to the search for ones which activate our sexual response in terms of Internet traffic. Almost as many people are looking to go “Awwwwww!” as are looking to go “Ahhhhhhhhhh…! “. Clearly, this is a powerful drive whose stimulation gives us great pleasure, and what’s more, all it takes is the right image to stimulate it.

I mean, look at this :

I has a fluffeh!

Doesn’t that just make you say “Awwwwwwww!”? The sleepy eyes on the dog, the adorable helplessness of the kitten, the sea of fluffy white fur in which the kitten is adrift… everything about this picture stimulates the cute center of our brain, and the resulting effect is so powerful as to completely take over our minds, and release feelings of affection, nurturing, protection, and attachment.

Clearly, evolution has given us this very strong drive, capable of swaying our reason and altering our perceptions, for a very good reason, namely, childrearing. If we did not find our children, and children in general, so endearing, and if this endearment were not so incredibly potent that it spills over to animals, cartoon character, and even cars, there is no way our motivation to nurture, protect, and raise our children could possible last through the longest maturation period in the animal kingdom.

A telling cue to this is in one of the most classic and cliched iconic images of cuteness is the classic bare bottom baby picture. ^[1]

Looked at objectively, one has to wonder why this image of a naked infant became so beloved. Specially, it is the bare behind that is the magic spark which seems to release an extra strong dose of the “cute” response. Why might that be?

The answer is that if we didn’t find baby’s bottoms not just cute but incredibly cute, there is no way our parental response could survive the incredibly strong signals from another strong drive, namely our “digust” response, that dealing with the management of said bottoms and their end products (ha ha) entails.

In other words, if baby bums were not cute, our parenting urges would die at the first diaper change.

This “cute” drive is so powerful that we domesticate animals who stimulate that urge and get them to live with us simply from this urge to nurture that which we find cute. Our pets become members of our families, just like our children do, and benefit greatly from this overflowing surplus of the nurturing urge.

It is so powerful, in fact, that it even gets mixed up with our love/sex drive. People of both genders invariably describe certain attractive members of their preferred gender (but interestingly, not others) as “cute”, and nobody seems to find this the slightest bit unusual. We use the same word to describe an adult with whom we wish to have sex and a child we want to cuddle, and yet obviously, we mean fairly radically different things in each case. Why, then, do we use the same word?

I think it is because, as a evolutionary strategy, some human variants have developed the urge to appeal to our two strong drives, sex and “cuteness”, at the same time. When viewed from that point of view, it is a winning combination. But one can’t help but wonder if the capacity for these drives to cross and combine plays a factor in things like pedophilia.

After all, the phrase “aren’t you a cute boy!” can be either adorable or creepy, depending on who is saying it, who they are saying it to, and how they say it, right?

So in conclusion, our cuteness response is so strong, it’s kind of fucked up.