![]() Their lambs exhibit kindchenschema, but ewes “are very sensitive to kin recognition” and will only nurture their own offspring. Not every species has the same response, however.įor example, Preston says, sheep live in social groups, and all pregnant ewes in the group typically give birth at about the same time of year. She notes that some form of kindchenschema turns up “across the board” in social mammals whose young require parental care. Preston, a professor of psychology and director of the Ecological Neuroscience Lab, studies how and why behaviors evolved in both humans and other species. So you come out with the brain not fully finished, still needing to develop, and you need more parental care.” Or, as his University of Michigan colleague Stephanie Preston puts it: “If there’s pressure to evolve a bigger brain, the brain can only get so big and still make it through the birth canal. ![]() … There is a need for parental care because the brain is developing over a longer period of time.” “We see a convergence of high intelligence and slower development. “Every organism has limited resources, so how are we going to allocate that effort? It’s always a trade-off,” says Kruger. Other species, particularly mammals, are born fairly helpless and rely on parental care for an extended period. Juveniles hatch fully feathered and virtually ready to fly. It’s a framework for understanding how natural selection may have shaped a species’ anatomy and behavior at different stages of life.Īt birth, many species must fend for themselves, such as the brush turkeys of Australia and Indonesia. Ewe Oughta Knowĭaniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan, believes cuteness can be explained through something called life history theory. Meanwhile, researchers trying to understand how cuteness evolved in the first place began to look more closely at which species exhibit it. Says Dale: “It does not operate mechanically like flushing a toilet, as Lorenz said.”įor scientists focused on the psychology of cuteness, the realization that our response to it is more complex than originally thought was the first hint that kindchenschema evokes more than just caregiving. He adds that while kindchenschema turned out to be an accurate way of defining cute stimuli, an individual’s response to it - shaped by personal experience, cultural variation and other factors - was not as automatic as the Austrian researcher had hypothesized. “They both succeeded and failed,” Dale says. “ considered this to be the ‘misfiring’ of a pure primal instinct to care only for one’s own young.”Īfter World War II, other researchers began to test Lorenz’s hypothesis about kindchenschema activating instinctual caregiving. “Lorenz - a card-carrying Nazi, eugenicist and advocate of the National Socialist doctrine of racial hygiene - actually believed that the fact that we feel baby animals are cute … is a bad thing,” says cultural theorist Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of English at Tokyo Gakugei University and an editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness. It was at odds with his ideology, which aligned with Germany’s Third Reich. (Credit: Eric Isselee/Shutterstock)ĭespite Lorenz’s prominence and the popularity of his kindchenschema work, something the myriad studies that name-drop him don’t mention is that he wasn’t a fan of our generalized cross-species cuteness response. ![]() The young of many species, including our own, exhibit kindchenschema: a suite of features - including proportionally large eyes, a small nose, high forehead and small ears - that disappear with age.
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