The Last Word On Nothing

I want a dog. For a while now, my awareness of this has been getting louder. It was when I encountered these little gentlemen that the urgency of the situation became undeniable. (If you value your hearing turn down the volume before you hit play.)

I’ve lived with many canines – parents’ dogs, roommate dogs, partners’ dogs, my dogs. These animals are an unceasing upside of being alive. However, owing to circumstances, I haven’t had a dog living in my house in 10 years. I have been too busy to commit real time to fretting about this – and life circumstances don’t permit remedying it just yet – but increasingly the sense of needing a dog has become absolute. My reactions to cuteness in public are becoming alarming. As you probably surmised from the pitchy caterwauling above (pity the poor owner).

That was when I remembered cuteness aggression. 

You’ve probably heard of this very press-friendly bit of science. When Oriana Aragón introduced the term in 2013, she put a name to a reality many people found all too familiar: incredibly, heart-stoppingly cute creatures make us want to squeeze them. We want to cuddle them. And when we do, our language quickly gets unhinged. I’ve never heard someone say “That’s so cute, I want to gently hold it!” We tip immediately into violence. “That’s so cute I could die”, “That’s so cute I want to eat it!”, “That’s so cute I just want to squish it!!” Our fists ball. Our teeth bare. We clench.

In the years since, the research occasionally floats back into the news. What makes something so cute YOU CAN’T STAND IT? Typically mammalian features, stereotypically babyish: big eyes, big cheeks, big foreheads, generally round and helpless. (Jenny insisted that spiky non-mammals can inspire cuteness aggression too, but I’ll need convincing.)

What’s the point of cuteness aggression? Theories have emerged to link this “dimorphic emotion” to evolutionary benefits like better caretaking. “It would not be adaptive to be overwhelmed and incapacitated by [purely] positive feelings toward cute animals (or babies), if such feelings would interrupt caretaking,” wrote a different group of researchers who investigated the brain signals of people experiencing cuteness aggression in 2018. Last year, Aragón, who did the initial research in Yale’s psychology department but is now a marketing professor at a business school, told Popular Mechanics that it may be a reminder to treat fragile things with care.

Or could it be more straightforward than that? I realised on Baby Twin Sausage Dog Morning (for those who observe) that in all of these experiments – which are probably not that lavishly resourced – the study participants are looking at pictures. You can’t squeeze a picture (well, I suppose you can but it’s pretty unsatisfying). 

Every time I have experienced the most intense cuteness aggression, it’s been in a context where I am not allowed to hug the individual in question. Those sausage dogs: I wanted to scoop them up and kiss their tiny little heads but they were not my dogs and doing so would be weird and rude. Looking at my pictures and videos of them also spikes my cuteness aggression.

So: does cuteness aggression amount to frustration that can only be ameliorated by getting the cute thing of your own? In fact, Aragón suggested something like this in an early article about her work. “Frustration over not being able to have the cute thing plays into it. We want to love it and take care of the puppy forever and ever, but we can’t, because it’s only a picture.”

Here’s the study design I propose: put an EEG tracker on people’s heads as they encounter an actual, living cute dog/cat/baby/whatever/Jenny can have her komodo dragon. Half the group is allowed to cuddle those animals and play with them to their heart’s content. The other half has to keep themselves at a polite distance while being left to manage their own emotions.

Hypothesis: the EEG of the people who are not allowed to pet the thing will reveal cuteness aggression that remains high and unresolved. In those who are allowed a cuddle, cuteness aggression signatures will spike and then calm.

In the second experiment, people (still wearing the EEG tracker) would be shown the pictures of cute animals, but while holding the real animals on their laps. Does their aggression still ramp up? Or is the real animal enough to quiet all those neural signatures of aggression?

These experiments would help unpick whether cuteness aggression has something to do with the disconnect between how much you want the cute thing and how much you can’t have it.

From my uninformed perspective, I think the results of my experiment would reveal that “cuteness aggression” may signal to a person that they are EXTREMELY AVAILABLE for looking after a small cute dog/cat/human/whatever/I’m sorry I just don’t accept that komodo dragons are cute. Although from having written an entire LWON post about this, I think the science on one thing is very clear: I need a dog.