If we find animals different from us and historically dangerous animals SCARY (many legs, no legs, insects, venomous species, etc), why do we find FLUFFY and FURRY animals CUTE when WE are practically hairless? Why are bears cute when they have historically posed great threat to us?

Question

Lot of hairy and fluffy looking organisms are also dangerous too… like those worms, bears, some plants, etc

In: 2

Answer 1

Like with all mind related questions there simply isn’t a “Eli5” answer available. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are both fairly young disciplines, so there truly aren’t many concrete and known facts about how our cognition of things and behaviour work, just a big pile of hypotheses and theories, and more often than not they are, in the end, ale correct and incorrect to some degree.

That’s how it is for animals we find scary, there isn’t one underlying behavioural reason but many different ones for different examples: some are literally ingrained into our DNA and function as an epigenetic rule to form cultural/cognitive perception of the supposed danger(spiders whom we are naturally programmed to more easily spot for example), some are caused by ToMM detector perceiving them as intending harm(Sharks, Venomous animals with bright colour markings) and some might be explained by the affect theory(Slugs, Rats).

The same most likely goes for us perceiving some animals as cute, there just isn’t a single answer as to “why”, but many different ones, like how the hypothesis that ToMM explains perception of cuteness as a lack of detection of maliciousness combined with lack of other clear intention signs(which explains why you might find a baby cute, a random person on a blind date cute, that elephant strolling by on the plains minding his own business cute), there is the Machiavellian monkey hypothesis which to some degree proposes that we find “easy targets” cute(that squirrel or mice that would be easy to hunt down, that guy who looks like he is easy to be swayed, that innocent girl who needs your protection), another explanations might be cultural printing(you find dogs cute cause they are everywhere and everyone feels safe next to them) or the affect theory(you love that millipede in the vivarium that you hold on your desk so you find it cute), and many more other theories. There just simply isn’t a single possible answer, and likely there never will be because our minds are a complicated machine with a surprisingly small amount of possible outputs, and as such the behaviouristic approach of “something in, a mechanism causes something, something out” rarely works that way, and more often one feeling is caused by many different “things” happening in the background at the same time.