Quantum: the Cute-Baby Effect

A QUANTUM OF SCIENCE

This just in: women like looking at "attractive" babies more than men do. That's unlikely to make any headlines, but the reverse case is where the surprise comes in: if a baby is "unattractive" through some objective standard, women like looking at it *less* than men do.

Researchers at the Clinical Psychopathology Laboratory or McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston report that the length of time that women vs. men spent looking at "normal" babies versus those affected by cleft palate, Down's Syndrome or other congenital birth defects were reversed: women spent longer looking at the "normal" babies than men did, but much less time looking at "unattractive" babies than men did. The authors of the study suggest that this might reflect an evolutionary bias on the part of women to spend less time and attention on the less viable of their offspring, correlating subjective lack of aesthetic appeal with decreased potential for viability.

For more information:

Gender Differences in the Motivational Processing of Babies Are Determined by Their Facial Attractiveness (Yamamoto et al.)


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