Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren bog Obam. Here, if you can think of a
Speaker 1: terrifying monster from popular culture, I can show you a
Speaker 1: version of that monster designed to be cute. From Freddy
Speaker 1: Krueger and Godzilla to Cathulu and Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
Speaker 1: We seem determined to transform our monsters into plushies, cartoon characters,
Speaker 1: and other cuti's. But why let's take a second to
Speaker 1: discuss what monsters and cute's actually are. You can go
Speaker 1: down the rabbit hole on the cognitive origin of monsters,
Speaker 1: but essentially, a monster is an unreal creature that's awesome
Speaker 1: in size or novel in its chimerical combination of natural forms.
Speaker 1: It threatens and terrifies us even as it relates some
Speaker 1: lesson or understanding of the world around us. For instance,
Speaker 1: a werewolf combines human and lupine characteristics, but also relays
Speaker 1: a message about the dual nature of human beings. We
Speaker 1: are both beast and something that aspires to be more.
Speaker 1: Acuteness is easy year to nail down, if only because
Speaker 1: it's so rooted in conditioned responses to human infants. The
Speaker 1: features that we call cute in babies, big eyes, fat
Speaker 1: cheeks are simply the ones that hijack human attention and response.
Speaker 1: After all, the infant is the fruit of our genetic programming.
Speaker 1: We can't help but attend to its needs. This view
Speaker 1: of cuteness falls in line with Charles Darwin's theory that
Speaker 1: natural selection favors creatures that, in infancy possess features that
Speaker 1: cause adults to protect them. Austrian pathologist Conrad Lawrence went
Speaker 1: on to outline these specific triggers involved, including short, thick extremities,
Speaker 1: and clumsy movements in addition to the big eyes and
Speaker 1: chubby cheeks. To what degree does cuteness hijack our senses?
Speaker 1: Though scientists have observed one seventh of a second response
Speaker 1: time and adults to unfamiliar infant faces, but not to
Speaker 1: adult faces. Japanese study found that people who viewed images
Speaker 1: of infant animals performed tasks better than those who viewed
Speaker 1: images of adult animals. In other words, cute stimuli improved
Speaker 1: performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness. Were simply hardwired
Speaker 1: to become careful guardians when cutei's called to us, and
Speaker 1: that bleeds over into inhuman cute's as well the kittens, puppies,
Speaker 1: and cartoon characters. Maybe those cute kitten posters in the
Speaker 1: office actually serve a purpose after all. At this point,
Speaker 1: it's easy to think of cuteness and monstrosity as separate entities,
Speaker 1: but the two states may exist upon the same spectrum
Speaker 1: of attention grabbing stimuli. Imagine a slider mechanism in a
Speaker 1: program or video game. One direction takes you into the
Speaker 1: realm of disgusting terror, and the other is a one
Speaker 1: way ticket to cute town. Social scientist Maya Jejovska Brechinska
Speaker 1: wrote a paper on this subject, Monstrous Cute Notes on
Speaker 1: the ambivalent nature of cuteness. In it, she argues that
Speaker 1: the cute and the monstrous exist in a single dimension,
Speaker 1: and that there is a tipping point as to how
Speaker 1: far you can push that cute slash monstrous slider. She
Speaker 1: writes that this spectrum quote works inevitably as a sort
Speaker 1: of pendulum, swinging to and fro, and thus being able
Speaker 1: to play its role only up to a certain point,
Speaker 1: where the sweetness becomes a mock and a pitiful or
Speaker 1: ironic ulter ego of itself. In other words, it's possible
Speaker 1: to push cuteness so far that it becomes sickening. If
Speaker 1: we're to push too far in the other direction, arguably
Speaker 1: the monstrous simply becomes ridiculous. Of course, in either case,
Speaker 1: individual thresholds to cute slash monster overload will vary. Monsters
Speaker 1: and cuts may stand at opposing exaggerations on the same
Speaker 1: slider a visual stimuli. But why would we move that
Speaker 1: slider to begin with? In making our monsters cute, we
Speaker 1: diminish the underlying natural or cultural horrors that they entail.
Speaker 1: In making the cute monstrous, we also dilute its brain
Speaker 1: hijacking potency. This might also entail what psychologist Oriented Arragon
Speaker 1: calls a dimorphous expression, in which an overly positive emotion
Speaker 1: produces a negative reaction. If you've ever felt the desire
Speaker 1: to pinch and overly cute into kitten, then you've felt
Speaker 1: this phenomenon firsthand. When cute gets tough to handle, a
Speaker 1: dash of horror balances it out. It would seem we
Speaker 1: create monsters for a variety of reasons, to entertain, to warn,
Speaker 1: or to chastise and thrill. We turn them cute to
Speaker 1: dull their power or repurpose them for commercial gain, But
Speaker 1: the slider can't always run back in the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: We can only rob our monsters of their powers for
Speaker 1: so long. Today's episode was written by Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Clang. To hear more about the monstrosity
Speaker 1: slash cuteness spectrum, look for the episode of that title
Speaker 1: on Robert's podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, And, of course,
Speaker 1: for more on this and lots of other topics so
Speaker 1: sweet you could eat them up, visit our home planet,
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot com.