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.

She looks so cutebaby