What makes a baby animal cute: six features, a test, and the teddy bear that got younger

Lorenz's list

In 1943 the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who would later share a Nobel prize for the study of animal behaviour, gave a name to the features that make an adult want to look after a young one almost without thinking: the Kindchenschema, the baby schema.¹ In a 1950 essay he listed them: a head that is large for the body, a skull vault that dominates the face, a short face under a large forehead, big eyes set low, bulging cheeks, short thick limbs, a springy, elastic feel and clumsy movements.²⁶

The first six are the animal’s sliders above. The last two are about touch and movement, which is why the animal squashes a little and hops when you tap it. In each drawing below only one feature changes; the rest stay in the middle.

In each pair, left is the grown-up version of a single feature, right is the baby version.

For a long time the schema stayed more drawing than measurement. The first experiment on real baby faces, by its authors’ own account, came only in 2009. Melanie Glocker and her colleagues measured the faces of 40 babies aged 7–13 months, then altered photographs of 17 of them, moving six proportions by up to 2 standard deviations each way: face width, forehead height, eye width, nose length and width, mouth width. The 62 students who rated how cute the faces were, on a scale from 1 to 5, found the faces with more schema cuter than the originals, and the originals cuter than the faces with less. Men and women rated alike.³

A second group of students was asked how much they would want to look after the child in the picture. Both women and men wanted to look after the high-schema babies more than the low-schema ones; only women also wanted to look after the high-schema babies more than the unaltered ones.³ And the preference starts early: in 2014, children aged 3 to 6 looked longer at the baby-schema versions of human, dog and cat faces, and spent 47% of their looking time on the eyes.⁵

Which one is cuter? Sixteen choices

Glocker changed all the features at once. Here only three change, independently of each other: how big the eyes are, how high the forehead is, and how long the snout is. In most pairs the features pull in different directions, so the choice is a trade-off. Pick the one you find cuter. There are no right answers.

How to read the result. For each feature, the number shows how many times out of 16 you chose the animal that had more of it. The pairs are built so that the other two features fall equally often on either side, so one preference cannot imitate another. From 13 of 16 upwards the result is marked “clear”. Someone choosing at random would still get a clear result, one way or the other, on at least one feature in about 6% of cases. The result is yours and goes nowhere.

The teddy bear that got younger

The oldest teddy bear in the Cambridge Folk Museum’s collection, dated 1903, had a low forehead, a long snout, and wore a muzzle.⁶

In 1985 the ethologist Robert Hinde and L. A. Barden measured the museum’s bears from photographs and plotted two proportions against the year each was made. The first is the forehead: the distance from the eyes to the crown, divided by the distance from the eyes to the base of the head. On the first bears it was below 1, meaning the eyes sat high. By the 1960s it was about 1.5. The trend was statistically clear (Spearman correlation 0.52), and so was the shortening of the snout (−0.74), “apparently complete by the 1930s”, the authors write.⁶

Then they measured the bears on the shelves of a Cambridge shop before Christmas 1984. Half had a ratio above about 1.5, and one reached about 2.3. They also noted one line with a very small brain case, ratio 0.59: Winnie the Pooh, which, they write, “has always been known for its lack of intelligence”.⁶

Teddy bears do not reproduce, Hinde and Barden point out, but the kinds that leave the shelves more easily one year are more likely to be made again the next. The buyers do the selecting. With a complication: makers know what sells, so they push in the same direction.⁶

Who chooses, then? In 1995 Paul Morris, Vasudevi Reddy and R. C. Bunting asked children aged 4, 6 and 8 to choose between bears with baby features and bears with grown-up ones. The 6- and 8-year-olds clearly preferred the baby-featured bears; the 4-year-olds did not. The authors’ conclusion: the bear’s evolution is not driven by the youngest children, the ones the bears are bought for.⁷

The 1985 chart had few bears. In 2025 a team of 17 researchers repeated the study, with its predictions written down in advance, on 250 bears from 8 manufacturers made between the 1900s and the 1980s. The forehead grew in their bears too (p = 0.002). Bigger eyes and a rounder head were not confirmed. The snout they could not measure, for lack of profile photographs.⁸

Mickey Mouse got younger too

In 1979 the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould took a pair of calipers to drawings of Mickey Mouse from three stages: the early 1930s, Mickey in Mickey and the Beanstalk (1947), and the Mickey of his day. The eye grew from 27% to 42% of head length, the head from 42.7% to 48.1% of body length, and the skull vault, measured as nose-to-front-ear against nose-to-back-ear, from 71.7% to 95.6%.²

The same reflex works on objects. In a 2011 study, 28 people looked at car fronts while electrodes measured their facial muscles. Versions altered along the baby schema, for instance with headlights enlarged like eyes, drew a more pleasant response than the original designs, and the response to them did not fade on a second viewing, though by then the original designs had caught up.¹⁰

Before you can say “aww”

In 2008 Morten Kringelbach’s team recorded the brain activity of 12 adults with magnetoencephalography while they looked at unfamiliar baby and adult faces. A region just behind the eyes, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, linked to reward, responded differently to the baby faces “within a seventh of a second”. The first clear difference came at about 130 milliseconds. The area specialised in recognising faces showed a difference only later, at about 165 ms.⁹

A year later Glocker’s team scanned the brains of women without children: the baby schema in a face activated the nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward system.⁴

The less cute part

Teddy bears don’t need to breathe. Dogs do. Breeders have selected bulldogs, French bulldogs and pugs for ever flatter faces, the authors of a 2015 study of 700 dogs write, because of the appeal of their juvenile, human-like features. Brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, a chronic disorder in which soft tissue blocks the airways, appeared in that study only in dogs whose muzzle was less than half the length of their cranium. A second study, of 154 short-faced dogs, confirmed that the risk rises sharply as the muzzle shortens.¹¹

The slider at the top stops at a drawing. In dogs, the same preference works on bodies that have to breathe.

What remains

Over more than seventy years Lorenz’s list has been through altered baby photographs, brain scanners and 250 teddy bears. It has broadly held, though not every feature passed every test. And all that time it has been at work, without asking us, every time we looked at a young animal.

The animal is still up there on its rug. It is still waiting to be tapped.

Method and sources

The animal is drawn from scratch on the screen. Each feature is a parameter between the grown-up shape (0) and the baby shape (100), and the “baby schema” percentage is the mean of the six. It is a position on the drawing, not a predicted cuteness score: no study has measured this animal.

Lorenz’s list is given from the English translation of his 1950 essay quoted by Gould and paraphrased by Hinde and Barden; Lorenz’s own texts were not read directly. The teddy bear values are read off Hinde and Barden’s Figure 1; the years are approximate, to about a year. The test uses a 16-pair design in which the three features vary independently; order and side are shuffled on every run.

Sources

1. Lorenz, K. (1943). Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5, 235–409. doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1943.tb00655.x
2. Gould, S. J. (1979). Mickey Mouse meets Konrad Lorenz. Natural History 88(5), 30–36. cognitionandculture.net/wp-content/uploads/Mickey-mouse-meets-konrad-lorenz.pdf
3. Glocker, M. L. et al. (2009). Baby schema in infant faces induces cuteness perception and motivation for caretaking in adults. Ethology 115, 257–263. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3260535/
4. Glocker, M. L. et al. (2009). Baby schema modulates the brain reward system in nulliparous women. PNAS 106, 9115–9119. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2690007/
5. Borgi, M. et al. (2014). Baby schema in human and animal faces induces cuteness perception and gaze allocation in children. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 411. frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00411/full
6. Hinde, R. A. & Barden, L. A. (1985). The evolution of the teddy bear. Animal Behaviour 33, 1371–1373. insects.st-andrews.ac.uk/files/2012/09/Hinde-and-Barden-1985-Anim-Behav.pdf
7. Morris, P. H., Reddy, V. & Bunting, R. C. (1995). The survival of the cutest: who’s responsible for the evolution of the teddy bear? Animal Behaviour 50, 1697–1700. researchportal.port.ac.uk/en/publications/the-survival-of-the-cutest-whos-responsible-for-the-evolution-of-/
8. Borredon, Q. et al., Morin, O. & Dubourg, E. (2025). Did teddy bears culturally evolve to be cuter? A preregistered replication. Journal of Cognition and Culture 25, 114–. hal.science/hal-05447937v1/document
9. Kringelbach, M. L. et al. (2008). A specific and rapid neural signature for parental instinct. PLoS ONE 3(2), e1664. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2244707/
10. Miesler, L., Leder, H. & Herrmann, A. (2011). Isn’t it cute: an evolutionary perspective of baby-schema effects in visual product designs. International Journal of Design 5(3), 17–30. ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/1023
11. Packer, R. M. A., Hendricks, A., Tivers, M. S. & Burn, C. C. (2015). Impact of facial conformation on canine health: brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome. PLoS ONE 10(10), e0137496. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4624979/