Cross-Cultural Comparisons of the Cute

People find baby animals to be cuter than human babies

I’m a co-author of this study that explores cross-cultural feelings about cuteness with Hiroshi Nittono and Shiri Lieber-Milo. 

We surveyed people in Japan, the US and Israel. In spite of the fact that each country has a different word for “cute” with culturally distinct connotations, we found some striking similarities in overall attitudes towards cuteness. 

For example, animal babies are thought to be cuter than human babies. This isn’t so surprising since domesticated animals were bred to be cute. But we also discovered that people in their fifties and sixties often found baby animals to be less cute and human babies to be more cute than younger respondents. This increasing attraction may indicate that grandparents played an important social role during human evolution in helping to care for and socialize the very young. 

In general, our study provides some evidence for the hypothesis that cuteness and the feelings it engenders are universal amongst human beings.