Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:25
So Cute! But You Want to EAT Your Puppy? Cute Agression Is a Primal Ancient Urge. Let’s meet the guy who’s the Scholar of Cute
And it really helps us understand what that urges to squeeze something. I'm just going to have so much fun with this conversation. I guess I'm just so excited. Joshua Paul Dale. Welcome to swell. In this conversation, I'm going to sort of break form. Sometimes I just jump right into the topic, but like, I did actually in this intro. But I want to know about you. So you're a professor, you live in Tokyo. How did this start?
Joshua Dale
@JPDale · 2:08
You know, the kind that have red and white, you know, alarm signal cones and then bars between them. But these were different. Instead of red and white cones, they had, like, hello kitties or green frogs or even, like, little hail and style princesses from a thousand years ago. Cute characters on the road to stop you from going into construction sites. And I just thought, what is going on?
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:35
Is there a testing they go through? I know marketing has a lot of testing, but when you're doing public signage and you're doing environmental design, where people are trying to sway people towards a certain behavior, what metrics do they use to see what is cute enough or broadly cute enough? um, for how do they measure all of that? Like, what is there a science to that? I'm sure there is
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Joshua Dale
@JPDale · 2:21
They include a large head, large forehead, big and low lying eyes, round, bulging cheeks, short and thick extremities, short arms and legs, a soft body surface with a springy elastic consistency and clumsy, wobbly movements. And since then, a lot of scientific studies have demonstrated that this is pretty much on target, and they've even extended it a little bit
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 0:49
And yet some kids are seen to be violent with little objects that make other people COO and they're like pulling them apart. Can you talk about if you've come across in your study how to look at acute aggression as a sign of something deeper going on with a child?
Joshua Dale
@JPDale · 1:15
You know, Deborah, I've never thought about that, and I'm not a child psychologist. So actually, I really like to know what other members of the Swell community think about this. I can say that in terms of the science of acute aggression, people who study this say that the aggression part of human aggression means the things that we say, like, it's so cute, I want to eat it up, or clenching our fists or clenching your teeth
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:14
But I do think that you might have thoughts about when the concept of cute enters into a child's vocabulary, what influences what's cute versus what's ugly. I think about Yoda. And when I first saw Yoda, I thought it wasn't cute. He wasn't cute. And now Yoda is in the mandalorian. I mean, yoda is everywhere. The whole lot line of Yodas are just these really weird looking things that are so cute. Like Et was cute