Why I want to punch Baby Yoda

Baby Yoda, or Grogu, the super-powered child star from Disney’s The Mandalorian, has won the world’s affection with his mischievous antics, mysterious origin story, and scientifically perfect baby babble. But if you, like me, find yourself wanting to reach through your screen and punch Baby Yoda, science says that’s normal too.

The urge to bite, pinch, punch, squish, or smother things that we find adorable is so common neuroscientists have a name for it: cute aggression. Many people have reported feeling this way after watching Baby Yoda do, well, just about anything, and Katherine Stavropoulos, an assistant professor at the University of California Riverside who has studied cute aggression, says that isn’t surprising.

“There seems to be a universal set of features that makes things cute,” Stavropoulos told The Science of Fiction. “A head that’s too big for your body, big eyes, chubby cheeks, a smaller nose. And if we look at Baby Yoda he has most of these things.” When something checks all of our cute boxes, she says, people just want to squeeze it.

So, why do we get this strange brain disease when the little green tot stuffs a blue macaron in his mouth? Stavropoulos, whose research focuses on differences in brain activity between kids with and without autism, first became interested in that question because she wondered whether people with autism experience cute aggression. But when she started digging into the scientific literature, she couldn’t find any papers that addressed the neuroscience basis for cute aggression at all.