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SALT LAKE CITY — The Puppy Cam is back for its fourth year, and it brings with it more than just the "squee factor": viewing cute things has been shown to have a tangible impact on human beings.
The Puppy Cam was first introduced in 2008 by a San Francisco couple who wanted a way to monitor their Shiba Inu puppies remotely. The live stream quickly became a hit, though, and the fourth go-around has amassed more than 59 million views since it went live May 21.
The success of the Puppy Cam reportedly came as a surprise to the couple. Humans are naturally drawn to what they perceive to be "cute," though. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense: human babies are entirely dependent on others to keep them alive, and for the survival of the species, it was imperative that early human babies made their parents want to take care of them. They did this by being cute.
Studies have shown that most humans, but especially females, react to and reward cuteness, paying more attention to infants who have big eyes and round faces than to those who have small, close-set eyes and flat foreheads. A nurturing instinct in adults kicks in, protecting young children until they can feed and clothe themselves.
Shortly thereafter, cuteness in humans begins to disappear. A 2011 study found that by five years of age, children cease to be unbearably adorable. Humans who retain infantile characteristics until later in life are often perceived to be more naive and helpless. They are also assumed to be more honest and innocent, and see harsher penalties when found to have done something wrong.
In animals, humans favor anything that even remotely resembles a human baby, meaning the infants of most species will set off humans' cuteness radar. Add to their disproportionately large heads and eyes their helplessness, and humans' nurturing instinct means a whole lot of "d'aww."
But cute things aren't the only ones benefitted by their cuteness. Those viewing them are affected, as well. A 2009 study found that perceived cuteness led to improved fine motor skills in the subjects studied. So not only do humans instinctively want to help cute things — viewing the cute things makes us more likely to be able to take care of them.
Researchers performing the study asked women to play the game "Operation" — the children's game whose buzzing sound is probably what people remember most about it — before viewing a slideshow with a high level of cuteness. After watching the slideshow, the women were asked to play the game again.
The researchers found that the women who had viewed the "high cuteness" slideshow showed improvement in their fine motor skills.
"This finding suggests that cuteness does not just influence one's willingness to engage in caregiving behaviors but also influences the ability of one to do so," wrote the study's authors at the time. "That is, cuteness not only compels us to care for cute things but also prepares us to do so via its effects on behavioral carefulness."
That means that not only are we rewarded psychologically for looking at cute things — multiple studies have found that humans enjoy being encountered with cuteness — but we are rewarded physiologically, as well. And with the explosion of cute that the Internet has become in recent years, it only makes sense that we should derive some benefit from it.
