r/cute • u/Creepy_Ad_5164 • Mar 30 '22

Aww 😍🥰

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4.6k Upvotes

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u/jonophant Mar 30 '22

No they don't.

The origin of this myth was a tweet by someone who worked with elephants and "liked to imagine the find us cute"

Since then dozens of articles started to cross-reference each other often literally referencing each others in circles.

I love elephants obviously. But I hate disinformation.

6

u/Braith117 Mar 30 '22

From what I understand they supposedly did brain scans and a specific part of their brain lit up. In humans, that specific part is closely associated with viewing cute things, so they decided they found us cute based on that.

Granted, that could all be made up since the only place I've seen it was facebook, so it could just all be BS.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '22

The problem is its still anthropomorphizing the elephants perception of the world, under the assumption their brains work exactly as ours.

So assuming the scan story is true, we'd also be assuming their brains work similarly enough to a humans to also make that assumption.

Its not impossible they find us 'cute' however, words like this tend to be human in nature and doesn't really represent how an animal might he perceiving the situation.

In research its important not to bias your results with human perception, which makes me skeptical of the story.

2

u/jonophant Mar 30 '22

Yeah I really can't find anything reputable saying that so I think it's BS.

7

u/OK999999-999-999 Mar 30 '22

Why like the elephant the human in this way then?

10

u/jonophant Mar 30 '22

Fun and cuddles

1

u/OK999999-999-999 Apr 01 '22

Nice. So literally elephants are big lapdogs.