Why they gave Mickey Mouse a baby face

Walt Disney was one of the first animation studios to exploit humankind’s fascination with baby faces.

Steven Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist, published a classic essay where he graphed changes to Mickey’s eye size and head shape. He pointed to how the mouse looked severely rat-like and angular when he first appeared in 1928 (his name was Steamboat Willie then). Even worse, Mickey Version 1.0 acted like a vindictive menace and a trickster. The character would never have won such adoration from Americans had his eyes stayed tiny and his forehead sloped.

Later, when Mickey evolved a baby face (and a sweet demeanor), he became lovable. His eyes went from beady to oversized, and his forehead became more rounded.

Disney didn’t invent the trend, but other studios gave their characters baby faces too. Most notable among them were the Japanese animators, who developed a style of big-eyed, baby-nosed characters we instantly recognize as having an “anime look.” For that matter, even the design team for the VW Beetle saw a chance to stamp a babyface on the front of their car.

Designers use this trick because it works. Empirical studies tell us that babyfaced adults come off warm, friendly, and non-threatening compared to their average-faced peers. In fact, our aggression dissolves in the presence of babies, baby animals, and babyfaced adults. Our dopamine shoots up (that’s a brain chemical linked to pleasure) and our oxytocin usually spikes too (that’s a brain chemical linked to cuddling, trust, and parental feelings). In the 1940s, Konrad Lorenz called this effect the “baby schema.” In the last few years, it’s earned another name, cute-aggression, which is the urge to squeeze and nuzzle the big-eyed, baby-nosed furball in front of you.

If aliens ever wanted to trap us to cart us away to their Tralfamadorian zoo, they might use golden retriever pups or baby sloths as bait. We’d be so overcome with cute aggression that we’d let down our defenses and lose track of our surroundings.

Heaps of other mammals and birds would fall for the same cute-bait. The evolutionary psychologist Sarah Hrdy tells the following stories in her book Mothers and Others:

• A lioness adopted 5 baby antelopes, ate one, and kept on caring for the others.
• A female leopard killed a baboon but adopted its baby (she carried the baby by the scruff of its neck into a tree and protected it as her own).
• Barnyard hens protected baby geese, ducks, and kittens in the nest.
• A female Jack Russell Terrier nursed a kitten to maturity.
• A female cat adopted a Rottweiler pup.

The rule seems to be that a species accustomed to helpless babies (like monkeys, cats, and birds) finds all mammalian babies adorable; but a species accustomed to able-bodied, roving babies (like horses, goats, and deer) doesn’t care about anyone’s young but their own. Monkeys, cats, and birds have indiscriminate baby-mania because they don’t see strange babies wandering into their nests very often. Horses, goats, and deer do.

The important point here is that our babyface-cute-response has ancient roots. Natural selection installed that neural circuitry in our ancestors’ brains back when they were still furry and walking on all fours. Our distant ancestors may have paid more attention than we do to an infant’s scent and less to its big eyes, but here is an ancient instinct connecting us to the rest of the mammals.

Most of my other pleasure buttons aren’t unique to humankind either. Other mammals experience primitive versions of fear, joy, courage, grief, and playfulness, and they feel these emotions in situations where we’d probably feel the same. But one thing separating us from the rest of Class Mammalia is our capacity to reflect on our emotions and say, “Hmm, I don’t usually feel nervous when I walk alone down the street, but I do today. Why is that?” We’re also uniquely able to imagine plausible scenarios: “If I were to walk down the street alone in that strange neighborhood, I’ll probably feel nervous.” No other mammal can do these things.

Still, I feel greater kinship with non-human mammals when I think about how much their neurophysiology resembles our own.

(Part 2 coming soon)

Originally published at superpinball.blogspot.com on August 22, 2018.