The Ash Twins Blog

Fresh off the presses: Sherman, Haidt, and Cohn (2009) find that viewing images of cute and cuddly animals improves performance on the game “Operation.”

Infantile physical morphology—marked by its “cuteness”—is thought to be a potent elicitor of caregiving, yet little is known about how cuteness may shape immediate behavior. To examine the function of cuteness and its role in caregiving, the authors tested whether perceiving cuteness can enhance behavioral carefulness, which would facilitate caring for a small, delicate child. In 2 experiments, viewing very cute images (puppies and kittens)—as opposed to slightly cute images (dogs and cats)—led to superior performance on a subsequent fine-motor dexterity task (the children’s game “Operation”). This suggests that the human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

The bottom line: Scalpels with cute puppy pommels may improve surgical outcomes.

The first ant farm was introduced in 1929 and patented in 1931 by Dartmouth engineering professor Frank Austin. It appears that Austin built his ant farms for his own enjoyment because he did not go on to start a business around his idea.

In 1956, novelty toymaker Milton Levine was watching ants on the sidewalk when he asked his partner, Joe Cossman, “Why don’t we come out with some kind of observation toy so kids can watch ants at home?” They began selling “home ant habitats,” which comprised a plastic box, a bag of sand, and a vial of ants. These home ant habitats were immediately popular. Levine and Cossman eventually settled on a farm theme for their product, and they registered “Ant Farm” as a proprietary trademark. Ant farms are considered to be educational, fun, and relatively low maintenance. Over 20 million ant farms have been sold under the Uncle Milton brand name.

Interestingly, discussion of ant farms uniformly refers to the collective farm as a toy, rather than to the individual ants as pets. Ants appear to be too alien to our humanizing sensibilities to be treated as pets/friends the same way we treat dogs and cats. I would conjecture that ant farms fascinate children because it gives them the semblance of control over an ecological environment, similar in principle to the control over ecologies that would have ensured social and ecological fitness among evolving hominids.

Kanazawa (2006) makes another correct prediction from sexual selection:

The generalized Trivers–Willard hypothesis . . . proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio, and parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the female reproductive success at a greater rate than male reproductive success in a given environment have a lower-than-expected offspring sex ratio. One heritable trait which increases the reproductive success of sons significantly more than that of daughters in the ancestral environment is the tendency toward violence and aggression. I therefore predict that violent parents have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio (more sons). The analysis of both American samples and a British sample demonstrates that battered women, who are mated to violent men, have significantly more sons than daughters.