19 October 2023
Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters?
Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have – the ones that elicit our care and protection – but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards.
Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids’ cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan’s kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. If adorable things really do rewire our brains, it can help answer some of the biggest questions we have about our evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication.
This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.
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‘Cute Studies’ and cute science
Back when I was an undergraduate, I wanted to study children’s literature. It has since become a field that encompasses not only literary studies, but also child development and psychology and the history of childhood. At the time, however, most scholars thought it was too trivial to warrant serious research. It was hard to know what to do. When I visited one of my favourite professors to discuss the idea, he said, ‘It’s as if you’re facing two ponds: one is full of crystal-clear water to the very bottom, and the other is full of silt and pond scum with zero visibility. You seem to take a look at both, before diving straight into the muddy pond.’ At nineteen I took this as a compliment, though now I wonder if it was meant as one. At any rate, it seems he was right. Decades later, when faced with the realisation that little about cuteness was clear, I took a deep breath and decided to dive right in.
I was starting to wonder if cuteness deserved more than the odd article or book. Was there enough there to justify an entirely new field of study? After all, it had worked for children’s literature. If I got it right, I could be the founder of a whole new field. Well, either that or I could be ignored completely.
I considered Linda Williams, who created the field of Porn Studies when she realised that this multibillion-dollar industry was virtually unstudied. Just like pornography, cuteness makes billions in revenue without anyone paying much attention, and it’s also viewed as too trivial to warrant scholarly attention. And at least it’s not as controversial.
Williams announced the arrival of Porn Studies by editing a volume of scholarly essays with the same name. I decided to begin a bit more modestly; I reached out to other scholars interested in cuteness by editing a special issue of an academic journal that I would call ‘Cute Studies’. I planned to write an editorial declaring this new field open for business. But would anyone want to join it?
I put out an open call for papers on various academic websites, then waited to see what would show up. And while I wasn’t exactly flooded with submissions, I did receive some fascinating articles, on topics including young women who wear Lolita fashion, how Singaporean influencers use cuteness to gain an audience, and an analysis of the kawaii lunchboxes that Japanese mothers make for their children. But one of them was a real game-changer. It was from Hiroshi Nittono, now director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka University.
Like me, Hiroshi had noticed that kawaii in Japan extends beyond the traits listed in Lorenz’s child schema. However, virtually all the empirical research in his field focused on Lorenz’s infantile traits. Because of the outsized presence of kawaii in Japan, Hiroshi felt that analysing how people there feel about it could broaden Lorenz’s schema in ways that could be useful to anyone interested in the nature of cuteness.
Hiroshi distributed questionnaires to hundreds of university students and office workers willing to take part in a survey and analysed their responses. He found that things such as sweets, flowers and smiles, which are not part of the child schema, could also trigger the feeling of kawaii. In fact ‘smile’ received the highest kawaii rating from study participants, exceeding even that for ‘baby’. This was an indication that Lorenz’s child schema wasn’t telling the whole story.
The university students and office workers who filled in Hiroshi’s questionnaire also referred to kawaii things as ‘yuru’. This is a hard word to translate. It can mean wobbly – an attribute that appears in the child schema – but it also means amateurish or imperfect. I had seen this for myself at the Pikachu Outbreak when people smiled and shouted ‘Kawaii!’ at Pikachus who mistimed their synchronised steps and fell on their fluffy backsides.
If cuteness is all about an irresistible instinct to nurture, then the watching crowd surely should have involuntarily leapt forward to help the fallen Pikachu. But that didn’t happen and, when you think about it, a child in need of real help – suffering and in pain – is not cute, either. Scientists like Hiroshi concluded that the feeling of kawaii encourages affiliation, which is social bonding in a broader sense than just nurturing. This is why feeling that something is cute makes us want to get closer to it, even if we have no particular desire to protect or nurture it. The suggestion that cuteness is a releaser of social engagement would explain why I found myself wanting to wave at and hug the marching Pikachus.