Superstimuli are typically artificial. I don’t have this problem with Dennett’s explanation of the sweet tooth just because cake exists—the cake is explained. And I wouldn’t be complaining about the cuteness explanation if the only thing cuter than the baby were an idealized drawing of a baby.
I wouldn’t use “superstimulus” to describe a bunny being merely cuter than a baby, but I would for a cuckoo too big for the nest, yet still being fed by the host. This is the result of an optimization process, though not an artificial one.
It’s in cuckoo interests to be attractive to host birds; it’s not obviously serving non-domesticated animals to be cute. It hasn’t historically stopped us from eating them at anywhere near the rates that would put that kind of pressure on.
it’s not obviously serving non-domesticated animals to be cute. It hasn’t historically stopped us from eating them at anywhere near the rates that would put that kind of pressure on.
If so, then it also doesn’t significantly harm humans to see animals as cute (since it doesn’t make us give up a source of food). If this is so, then a much weaker justification might be accepted for the source of cuteness, perhaps as weak as “side effect of phenotypically unrelated evolution”.
Can’t find the citation now, but at least some of the reason that host birds feed baby cuckoos is that parent cuckoos monitor how well their offspring are doing and will destroy the nests of birds that fail to feed the cuckoo chick. So there’s selective pressure to respond to the cuckoo chick’s stimulus without it necessarily being a superstimulus.
I saw that hypothesis when I was looking for the picture, but it doesn’t apply to the particular picture, where the cuckoo is the only chick in the nest, in fact, too big for even the mother to perch on the rim. That was way beyond the pictures I’d seen before, where the cuckoo is merely bigger than the mother. Actually, the picture doesn’t make sense me: how can the mother provide enough food for this gigantic chick, much bigger than her whole brood?
That seems like pretty strong evidence for the superstimulus hypothesis. Do they also feed chicks of their own species in other nests? Is it just philanderers? otherwise, it sounds like pretty poor fitness.
Given 5000 species of mammals in the world that are guaranteed to have a number of facial features in common with humans and a number of developmental similarities, shouldn’t some happen to super-stimulate our cuteness sense just by chance?
This doesn’t rule out the baby hypothesis (although I don’t accept it as the best one, myself). The important thing is that we do consider babies somewhat cute. By the hypothesis, if babies weren’t cute at all (if everyone recognized how ugly they are), adults would care for them less. If true, this would be a beneficial instinct despite the attention wasted on cute animals.
Since evolutionary adaptations are selected from chance mutations to begin with, it’s not unreasonable for one to have mildly negative side effects. Can someone weigh in on how numerically probable it is that evolution hadn’t improved this instinct further, to only work on babies, if we assume it has existed for X millions of years? We need hard numbers...
I wonder if we don’t repress thinking that babies are cute to some extent. Before I had one, I never thought babies were cute. I just thought: eww, work! or, eww, delayed career plans! They represent responsibility, which isn’t cute. (Similar to contents of this thread.)
But if you were walking in a forest and just happened to find a baby. If you didn’t know it was a human baby, with various obligations and long-term ties, wouldn’t you want to pick it up and snuggle it? Or not?
I’ll also add here, though it could be added other places, that I don’t know if most parents think newborns are cute. (I actually have a theory that children are born a few weeks earlier than evolution long-term conditioned us for.) Children are maximally cute somewhere between 6 months and 3 years and each parent differs in exactly when and why.
But if you were walking in a forest and just happened to find a baby. If you didn’t know it was a human baby, with various obligations and long-term ties, wouldn’t you want to pick it up and snuggle it? Or not?
Unless the baby is likely to be a relative, isn’t this actually vastly less adaptive behavior than picking up a cute bunny rabbit that you can eat later in times of famine?
Unless the baby is likely to be a relative, isn’t this actually vastly less adaptive behavior than picking up a cute bunny rabbit that you can eat later in times of famine?
Now this is an explanation I can accept as at least remotely plausible without doing mental gymnastics!
I don’t have strong opinion if babies are above or below 0-cuteness level, it seems to vary from person to person—but they’re definitely below mammal average baby cuteness.
That looks like just the evo-psych kind of reasoning Alicorn is warning against.
Compare: given 5000 species of mammals that are guaranteed to have many physical features in common with humans, shouldn’t some happen to super-stimulate our sexual attraction just by chance? Why would mating choice be that much more strongly selected than baby nurturing behavior?
ETA: some good explanations for this difference have been proposed in the comments below:
Only mating choice is subject to sexual selection, which is a powerful force. (Eliezer)
Animals aren’t deliberately trying to appear cute. But other humans are always trying to appear sexy. Therefore our sexual choice heuristics evolved to better eliminate false positives. (Me)
Actually, it makes perfect sense for sexual selection on sexual-attractiveness-features to be subject to far greater selection pressure and fine-tuning than baby-cuteness.
I’ll make a testable prediction here: Cases of parental superstimulus (like baby ducks following a stick figure, infant monkeys getting attached to puppets, etc., if I’m remembering correctly) ought to be far more common / easier to fake than sexual superstimulus. I’ll limit the key part of the prediction to complex vertebrates so that they have large enough brains to be complicated, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find the rule more universal than that.
That’s my point. Jack’s theory, which rests entirely on the fact other animals look similar to human babies, does not explain why many animals are cute while not a single animal is (widely) sexually attractive.
Well, “catgirls” seem to have large appeal, but that’s easily explained away—they’re 99% human with 1% added kitten for massive cuteness signal in a way that doesn’t interfere with any human sexual signals. It’s a lot like 99% with 1% added flower in form of perfume being more sexually attractive than 100% natural human.
The cost of a mistake may be lower in the case of cuteness than sexiness.
Indeed, sexual arousal is comparatively difficult to trigger, even by members of the actual target group: most humans don’t find most humans of the opposite sex very attractive, while they may find most babies somewhat cute.
The cost of a mistake may be lower in the case of cuteness than sexiness.
“May” be. I don’t see this as being demonstrated. I prefer explanations like Eliezer’s that show greater selection pressure—there’s a whole range of explicit sexual selection, but no real selection on other species for cuteness.
Here’s another explanation: other species don’t benefit from being cute-to-humans, so they don’t spend their time trying to cheat humans into perceiving them as cute. But humans are deliberately trying to be sexually attractive and are very good at taking advantage of any weak points in our sexual heuristics. Therefore our heuristics evolved to eliminate false positives.
Most? You think there are more than 2500 species which adult humans would say are cuter than babies? That seems wildly implausible to me; I’d say no more than 300 or so are on par with babies, and fewer exceed it. That isn’t too much; surely you could list maybe not >300 species but a measly 150.
How about birds? >10,000 species there; you think there are >5,000 extremely cute birds?
I’d venture that there isn’t even a bare majority of cuteness at zoos—institutions would would select for cuteness.
Superstimuli are typically not found in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (or else the executions that latched on to them inappropriately would tend to decrease in frequency through the population). Although humans have spread to habitats outside Africa, the largest changes since then have been ones humans have made—i.e. “artificial”.
That is a reasonable explanation. (I don’t know why you were downvoted, and voted you back up to 0.)
But theoretically, it’s possible to have a superstimulus for cuteness that existed in our EEA, if the maladaptive behavior that would be triggered by it is more easily prevented by a cultural norm or another adaptation, instead of by tuning down our cuteness sense for it.
Oh, it’s absolutely possible—this I why couched the phrasing in terms of “typically” and “tend to”.
And, well, votes are noisy.
If I had to ascribe a reason, it would be definitional—superstimulus could be used to just mean “trigger the adaptation more than what the adaptation was for”, which need not imply any significant harm, or it could be used to mean “will trigger the adaptation to such a strong extent, that it does cause harm, either by inappropriate behavior to the stimulus, or disrupting appropriate behavior to the stimulus it was adapted for.”
I think the latter definition is more useful, though I admit that the examples I’ve tried to find for excluding based on it (finding patterns in randomness, finding faces in car grills) also didn’t trigger more than the usual stimulus, so would have been excluded from the first definition as well.
Those aren’t nearly as cute. They have that ugly shape on them that doesn’t contribute to paperclip functionality. You could clip that part off and make a second clip for each one of them, given all that they waste.
Well, I want to protect them and keep them in a safe place so that other processes in the universe don’t convert them into ugly non-paperclip forms. Just looking at that thing makes me want to envelop it within the safe zone!
Cuteness disgusts me a little too. (I wrote this comment without having read yours.) I don’t think it has anything to do with psychopathy (in my case, I think I am more empathetic than average by at least one standard deviation) but sensory fatigue and resistance to being emotionally manipulated.
I am lacking in empathy, but I’m nowhere near charismatic or confident enough to be a psychopath. In fact I lack empathy to the point where it would be nearly impossible for me to manipulate other people: I can’t figure them out well enough to push their buttons.
I possess a few cognitive traits associated with autism, though most likely not enough to be formally diagnosed as autistic.
I’m sorry about your lack of empathy, as it seems like it might feel isolating. (If it is—I shouldn’t project.)
Are you sure you would like to push people’s buttons if you could? (No guilt? Or are you relieved you don’t?)
One autism trait is difficulty making eye contact, because it is over-stimulating. Do you feel more comfortable looking at pictures of the baby with closed eyes than the bunny with the open eyes? Or does that not have anything to do with anything?
As it happens I’m pretty introverted so my difficulty in social situations doesn’t bother me, I quite like having a fairly empty social calendar. I can cope fairly well in social situations, mostly because I’ve learned the proper rules for conduct they way I learn any unfamiliar information. The problem is when I find myself in unfamiliar social situations (like dating) where I don’t know the rules.
I’m really not keen on being able to manipulate people, though at times I think I’d be sorely tempted. In any case its a moot point because without extensive cognitive modification of kind currently unknown to science, I really don’t think I’m able to manipulate people.
I don’t have the eye contact issue, and I really don’t know why I find cute things off-putting. On rare occasions I find cute things endearing, for instance I liked the chipmunk-tarantula that someone else has posted on this thread. The only common thread I can find is that things that are uncanny or unusual tend not to disgust me even if they’re cute. Also, apart from cute things I find almost nothing disgusting.
Here. In particular see the meta-analysis (4th on the list). For the connection to babies and cuteness see the second to last on the list. To summarize: the fear expression mimics infantile expressions- enlarging the eyes and opening the mouth. The reason for this is that the way babies look elicits a caring and protection response in other people. Psychopathy is, at least partly, a dysfunction in processing fear expressions. There is decreased amygdala activity in response to distress expressions among psychopaths relative to control groups. Thus, finding babies disgusting suggests some pretty serious amygdala dysfunction.
There is no direct evidence that finding cute babies disgusting means you’re a psychopath but it suggests that the something pretty abnormal is going on with the person’s experience of empathy.
Note that saying someone is a psychopath that doesn’t mean he/she has committed any crimes or is particularly damaging to society. Indeed, given some estimations it would be very surprising if there weren’t several psychopaths reading Less Wrong. Higher even, since there is some evidence of comorbidity with other conditions that seem to be unusually common here (like ADHD and problems with executive functioning, for example). I guess being called one carries with it some negative social costs. That should have occurred to me and maybe it is reasonable to delete my comment above as result. I honestly just saw the evidence and thought it was an interesting thing to point out- I wasn’t being reflective.
Thank you for the references, upvoted. But it’s not clear to me that “finding babies uncute” has actually been linked to psychopathy per se, albeit it might be something interesting to investigate because of a couple of chained correlations. In fact the term “fairly strong evidence” in the original comment does seem misplaced, unless you know of a specific experiment indicating that.
(Also, would “fairly strong evidence” in this context mean say “a likelihood factor of ten for finding babies uncute, even though the base frequency of psychopaths is low” or “a substantial fraction of people who find babies uncute are in fact psychopaths”?)
The way you characterized the evidence I would have said, “This comment reminded me: there’s an interesting correlation between psychopathy and finding babies uncute—it comes down to the relation to the fear expression and infantile expressions.”
But I would want more evidence (particularly regarding alternative mechanisms for baby-distaste) before I claimed a likelihood factor as large as ten.
Note that saying someone is a psychopath that doesn’t mean he/she has committed any crimes or is particularly damaging to society...I guess being called one carries with it some negative social costs.
Indeed, I suspect that most people who aren’t versed in psychology hear “psychopath” simply as a negative-affect-word meaning “sick, twisted person likely to have committed a heinous crime”.
Sorry, I was thinking that psychopath was an out of date term for sociopath, but apparently it is a non-DSM diagnosis for a particularly extreme, predatory type of sociopath.
It really isn’t your fault. The DSM is fracking mess on this. They basically defined ASPD (which is usually what sociopath refers to) to extend to pretty much everyone who breaks the law. It is just a way of diagnosing all criminals with something. It is dominated by things basically every criminal by definition has done. It is a fake disorder. It just happens that there is this real condition which happens to make it extremely likely a person will be diagnosed with ASPD.
That said, having read more of the AMA I think there is a pretty high probability of psychopathy (I’m not qualified to diagnose but, then, I’m not sure the people who are know what the hell they’re doing).
1) The baby is far cuter than the rabbit.
2) There’s nothing wrong with a stimulus having a superstimulus.
Superstimuli are typically artificial. I don’t have this problem with Dennett’s explanation of the sweet tooth just because cake exists—the cake is explained. And I wouldn’t be complaining about the cuteness explanation if the only thing cuter than the baby were an idealized drawing of a baby.
I wouldn’t use “superstimulus” to describe a bunny being merely cuter than a baby, but I would for a cuckoo too big for the nest, yet still being fed by the host. This is the result of an optimization process, though not an artificial one.
It’s in cuckoo interests to be attractive to host birds; it’s not obviously serving non-domesticated animals to be cute. It hasn’t historically stopped us from eating them at anywhere near the rates that would put that kind of pressure on.
How does the same cuckoo manage to be attractive to so many host birds?
If so, then it also doesn’t significantly harm humans to see animals as cute (since it doesn’t make us give up a source of food). If this is so, then a much weaker justification might be accepted for the source of cuteness, perhaps as weak as “side effect of phenotypically unrelated evolution”.
Can’t find the citation now, but at least some of the reason that host birds feed baby cuckoos is that parent cuckoos monitor how well their offspring are doing and will destroy the nests of birds that fail to feed the cuckoo chick. So there’s selective pressure to respond to the cuckoo chick’s stimulus without it necessarily being a superstimulus.
There isn’t strong evidence of this.
~Bird Dork.
Good to know. Wikipedia calls one particular paper “rather convincing”—is it on crack in this instance?
I saw that hypothesis when I was looking for the picture, but it doesn’t apply to the particular picture, where the cuckoo is the only chick in the nest, in fact, too big for even the mother to perch on the rim. That was way beyond the pictures I’d seen before, where the cuckoo is merely bigger than the mother. Actually, the picture doesn’t make sense me: how can the mother provide enough food for this gigantic chick, much bigger than her whole brood?
Maybe that’s not the mother. Some birds will feed cuckoos in nests not their own.
That’s pretty crazy! I’d like a cite.
That seems like pretty strong evidence for the superstimulus hypothesis. Do they also feed chicks of their own species in other nests? Is it just philanderers? otherwise, it sounds like pretty poor fitness.
I just recall reading it somewhere, sorry. It could easily be wrong. (I did find something talking about a goose feeding a bunch of fish, though.)
Given 5000 species of mammals in the world that are guaranteed to have a number of facial features in common with humans and a number of developmental similarities, shouldn’t some happen to super-stimulate our cuteness sense just by chance?
Lots of them superstimulate compared to human babies. It doesn’t seem very coincidental to me. There are even birds that are cuter than human babies.
This doesn’t rule out the baby hypothesis (although I don’t accept it as the best one, myself). The important thing is that we do consider babies somewhat cute. By the hypothesis, if babies weren’t cute at all (if everyone recognized how ugly they are), adults would care for them less. If true, this would be a beneficial instinct despite the attention wasted on cute animals.
Since evolutionary adaptations are selected from chance mutations to begin with, it’s not unreasonable for one to have mildly negative side effects. Can someone weigh in on how numerically probable it is that evolution hadn’t improved this instinct further, to only work on babies, if we assume it has existed for X millions of years? We need hard numbers...
I don’t find babies cute at all—the shitting crying obnoxious variety which really exists is strongly anti-cute.
On the other hand I haven’t met a single person yet who wouldn’t go awwwwww when interacting with my cat.
I wonder if we don’t repress thinking that babies are cute to some extent. Before I had one, I never thought babies were cute. I just thought: eww, work! or, eww, delayed career plans! They represent responsibility, which isn’t cute. (Similar to contents of this thread.)
But if you were walking in a forest and just happened to find a baby. If you didn’t know it was a human baby, with various obligations and long-term ties, wouldn’t you want to pick it up and snuggle it? Or not?
I’ll also add here, though it could be added other places, that I don’t know if most parents think newborns are cute. (I actually have a theory that children are born a few weeks earlier than evolution long-term conditioned us for.) Children are maximally cute somewhere between 6 months and 3 years and each parent differs in exactly when and why.
Unless the baby is likely to be a relative, isn’t this actually vastly less adaptive behavior than picking up a cute bunny rabbit that you can eat later in times of famine?
Now this is an explanation I can accept as at least remotely plausible without doing mental gymnastics!
Probably not.
I don’t have strong opinion if babies are above or below 0-cuteness level, it seems to vary from person to person—but they’re definitely below mammal average baby cuteness.
Personally I agree, but many people report that they find babies cute. It’s not universal.
That looks like just the evo-psych kind of reasoning Alicorn is warning against.
Compare: given 5000 species of mammals that are guaranteed to have many physical features in common with humans, shouldn’t some happen to super-stimulate our sexual attraction just by chance? Why would mating choice be that much more strongly selected than baby nurturing behavior?
ETA: some good explanations for this difference have been proposed in the comments below:
Only mating choice is subject to sexual selection, which is a powerful force. (Eliezer)
Animals aren’t deliberately trying to appear cute. But other humans are always trying to appear sexy. Therefore our sexual choice heuristics evolved to better eliminate false positives. (Me)
Actually, it makes perfect sense for sexual selection on sexual-attractiveness-features to be subject to far greater selection pressure and fine-tuning than baby-cuteness.
I’ll make a testable prediction here: Cases of parental superstimulus (like baby ducks following a stick figure, infant monkeys getting attached to puppets, etc., if I’m remembering correctly) ought to be far more common / easier to fake than sexual superstimulus. I’ll limit the key part of the prediction to complex vertebrates so that they have large enough brains to be complicated, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find the rule more universal than that.
It’s not 1 of 5000 species of mammals which is cuter than human babies—it seems like most of them are.
That’s my point. Jack’s theory, which rests entirely on the fact other animals look similar to human babies, does not explain why many animals are cute while not a single animal is (widely) sexually attractive.
Well, “catgirls” seem to have large appeal, but that’s easily explained away—they’re 99% human with 1% added kitten for massive cuteness signal in a way that doesn’t interfere with any human sexual signals. It’s a lot like 99% with 1% added flower in form of perfume being more sexually attractive than 100% natural human.
The cost of a mistake may be lower in the case of cuteness than sexiness.
Indeed, sexual arousal is comparatively difficult to trigger, even by members of the actual target group: most humans don’t find most humans of the opposite sex very attractive, while they may find most babies somewhat cute.
“May” be. I don’t see this as being demonstrated. I prefer explanations like Eliezer’s that show greater selection pressure—there’s a whole range of explicit sexual selection, but no real selection on other species for cuteness.
Here’s another explanation: other species don’t benefit from being cute-to-humans, so they don’t spend their time trying to cheat humans into perceiving them as cute. But humans are deliberately trying to be sexually attractive and are very good at taking advantage of any weak points in our sexual heuristics. Therefore our heuristics evolved to eliminate false positives.
Most? You think there are more than 2500 species which adult humans would say are cuter than babies? That seems wildly implausible to me; I’d say no more than 300 or so are on par with babies, and fewer exceed it. That isn’t too much; surely you could list maybe not >300 species but a measly 150.
How about birds? >10,000 species there; you think there are >5,000 extremely cute birds?
I’d venture that there isn’t even a bare majority of cuteness at zoos—institutions would would select for cuteness.
If I had a list of species-weighted random pictures of mammals, I would take the bet that random mammal baby is cuter than human baby.
Where do you get this—“Superstimuli are typically artificial”?
Superstimuli are typically not found in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (or else the executions that latched on to them inappropriately would tend to decrease in frequency through the population). Although humans have spread to habitats outside Africa, the largest changes since then have been ones humans have made—i.e. “artificial”.
That is a reasonable explanation. (I don’t know why you were downvoted, and voted you back up to 0.)
But theoretically, it’s possible to have a superstimulus for cuteness that existed in our EEA, if the maladaptive behavior that would be triggered by it is more easily prevented by a cultural norm or another adaptation, instead of by tuning down our cuteness sense for it.
Oh, it’s absolutely possible—this I why couched the phrasing in terms of “typically” and “tend to”.
And, well, votes are noisy.
If I had to ascribe a reason, it would be definitional—superstimulus could be used to just mean “trigger the adaptation more than what the adaptation was for”, which need not imply any significant harm, or it could be used to mean “will trigger the adaptation to such a strong extent, that it does cause harm, either by inappropriate behavior to the stimulus, or disrupting appropriate behavior to the stimulus it was adapted for.”
I think the latter definition is more useful, though I admit that the examples I’ve tried to find for excluding based on it (finding patterns in randomness, finding faces in car grills) also didn’t trigger more than the usual stimulus, so would have been excluded from the first definition as well.
Seconded. Why should this be the case?
As a counterexample, some people find rabbits cuter than babies.
Were you begging the question for humor’s sake?
Yes, and of all the places not to get that...
It wasn’t funny.
The editing (choice of
This is far cuter than all of them put together.
But how do you feel about these?
Those aren’t nearly as cute. They have that ugly shape on them that doesn’t contribute to paperclip functionality. You could clip that part off and make a second clip for each one of them, given all that they waste.
So, not so much “nurturing” behavior induced.
What sort of nurturing behavior do you feel compelled to exhibit toward paperclips? Now I’m curious.
Well, I want to protect them and keep them in a safe place so that other processes in the universe don’t convert them into ugly non-paperclip forms. Just looking at that thing makes me want to envelop it within the safe zone!
This is the moment when Clippy jumped the shark.
Cuteness actually disgusts me a little, and I find the baby more off-putting than the rabbit, so I guess I think the baby cuter too.
Cuteness disgusts me a little too. (I wrote this comment without having read yours.) I don’t think it has anything to do with psychopathy (in my case, I think I am more empathetic than average by at least one standard deviation) but sensory fatigue and resistance to being emotionally manipulated.
I am lacking in empathy, but I’m nowhere near charismatic or confident enough to be a psychopath. In fact I lack empathy to the point where it would be nearly impossible for me to manipulate other people: I can’t figure them out well enough to push their buttons.
I possess a few cognitive traits associated with autism, though most likely not enough to be formally diagnosed as autistic.
I’m sorry about your lack of empathy, as it seems like it might feel isolating. (If it is—I shouldn’t project.)
Are you sure you would like to push people’s buttons if you could? (No guilt? Or are you relieved you don’t?)
One autism trait is difficulty making eye contact, because it is over-stimulating. Do you feel more comfortable looking at pictures of the baby with closed eyes than the bunny with the open eyes? Or does that not have anything to do with anything?
As it happens I’m pretty introverted so my difficulty in social situations doesn’t bother me, I quite like having a fairly empty social calendar. I can cope fairly well in social situations, mostly because I’ve learned the proper rules for conduct they way I learn any unfamiliar information. The problem is when I find myself in unfamiliar social situations (like dating) where I don’t know the rules.
I’m really not keen on being able to manipulate people, though at times I think I’d be sorely tempted. In any case its a moot point because without extensive cognitive modification of kind currently unknown to science, I really don’t think I’m able to manipulate people.
I don’t have the eye contact issue, and I really don’t know why I find cute things off-putting. On rare occasions I find cute things endearing, for instance I liked the chipmunk-tarantula that someone else has posted on this thread. The only common thread I can find is that things that are uncanny or unusual tend not to disgust me even if they’re cute. Also, apart from cute things I find almost nothing disgusting.
I have never heard of autistics having difficulty making eye contact with animals...
There are some correlations that suggest a possible relationship between finding cute things disgusting and psychopathy.
(Non-edited version was over-confident, some comments below reflect that)
Citation needed.
Here. In particular see the meta-analysis (4th on the list). For the connection to babies and cuteness see the second to last on the list. To summarize: the fear expression mimics infantile expressions- enlarging the eyes and opening the mouth. The reason for this is that the way babies look elicits a caring and protection response in other people. Psychopathy is, at least partly, a dysfunction in processing fear expressions. There is decreased amygdala activity in response to distress expressions among psychopaths relative to control groups. Thus, finding babies disgusting suggests some pretty serious amygdala dysfunction.
There is no direct evidence that finding cute babies disgusting means you’re a psychopath but it suggests that the something pretty abnormal is going on with the person’s experience of empathy.
Note that saying someone is a psychopath that doesn’t mean he/she has committed any crimes or is particularly damaging to society. Indeed, given some estimations it would be very surprising if there weren’t several psychopaths reading Less Wrong. Higher even, since there is some evidence of comorbidity with other conditions that seem to be unusually common here (like ADHD and problems with executive functioning, for example). I guess being called one carries with it some negative social costs. That should have occurred to me and maybe it is reasonable to delete my comment above as result. I honestly just saw the evidence and thought it was an interesting thing to point out- I wasn’t being reflective.
Thank you for the references, upvoted. But it’s not clear to me that “finding babies uncute” has actually been linked to psychopathy per se, albeit it might be something interesting to investigate because of a couple of chained correlations. In fact the term “fairly strong evidence” in the original comment does seem misplaced, unless you know of a specific experiment indicating that.
(Also, would “fairly strong evidence” in this context mean say “a likelihood factor of ten for finding babies uncute, even though the base frequency of psychopaths is low” or “a substantial fraction of people who find babies uncute are in fact psychopaths”?)
Yes. This was why I qualified the initial claim with “fairly”. Perhaps it should have been qualified further.
The way you characterized the evidence I would have said, “This comment reminded me: there’s an interesting correlation between psychopathy and finding babies uncute—it comes down to the relation to the fear expression and infantile expressions.”
But I would want more evidence (particularly regarding alternative mechanisms for baby-distaste) before I claimed a likelihood factor as large as ten.
Alright, this + the sensitivity of the subject lead men to edit the original comment. Th
Indeed, I suspect that most people who aren’t versed in psychology hear “psychopath” simply as a negative-affect-word meaning “sick, twisted person likely to have committed a heinous crime”.
Here’s a single data point—a sociopath that does have a cuteness response. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/988bl/i_am_a_sociopath_unable_to_feel_guilt_ama/c0l0j3u?context=3
Interesting AMA. No reason to think he is a psychopath though.
Sorry, I was thinking that psychopath was an out of date term for sociopath, but apparently it is a non-DSM diagnosis for a particularly extreme, predatory type of sociopath.
It really isn’t your fault. The DSM is fracking mess on this. They basically defined ASPD (which is usually what sociopath refers to) to extend to pretty much everyone who breaks the law. It is just a way of diagnosing all criminals with something. It is dominated by things basically every criminal by definition has done. It is a fake disorder. It just happens that there is this real condition which happens to make it extremely likely a person will be diagnosed with ASPD.
That said, having read more of the AMA I think there is a pretty high probability of psychopathy (I’m not qualified to diagnose but, then, I’m not sure the people who are know what the hell they’re doing).
Wikipedia redirects “sociopathy” to “psychopathy”.