By Staff Writer: Caitlin Daugherty
What makes anime characters cute? What makes mice cute? What makes that one itty bitty teacup you pass in Goodwill cute? It all comes down to the way we see babies.
We have this sort of biological urge to care for babies. It makes sense right? In order to keep the species chugging along you kind of have to want to care for your offspring. So, the features that babies have, round head, chubby stubby body, and big eyes are seen as “cute”. In a nutshell, cute in the sense that we are talking about is just something that is appealing in a nurturing or innocent way, babies and baby animals.
So why are animals cute to us? You would think that we wouldn’t care about the newborn offspring of other animals simply because it would not benefit us to find another species’ babies cute, but pretty much all of humankind finds puppies and kitties cute. Again, this wraps back around to the characteristics of a baby. The big heads, the big round eyes, and the stubby limbs are all indicative of a creature that needs to be taken care of and doted on. The funny thing about super cute animals and babies is that a lot of us feel an almost insatiable urge to bite and squeeze things that we find cute.
Cute aggression might make you feel like a horrible monster that just wants to kill and eat babies but do not worry. This theory might dissuade some of your guilt. Psychologists have this idea that we are so overwhelmed with positive emotions that we balance it out by feeling the negative urge to destroy the thing that is making us feel this way. About half of the population feels these feelings. So do not feel guilty for wanting to squish the life out of your pet hamster. As long as you just translate those feelings to gentle pets and kisses, you’re just as normal as the rest of animal and baby loving humankind.