Cuteness Is Political
· Time
When you think of a military general, the descriptor “cute” probably doesn’t come to mind.
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But cuteness may have helped Prabowo Subianto, a former military leader and defense minister, reshape his image to prevail as a conservative presidential candidate in Indonesia’s 2024 elections. His campaign positioned Subianto as a cuddly grandfather-type figure—complete with AI-generated cartoons—despite his controversial military past.
Our recent research suggests that this electoral result isn’t all that surprising. Specifically, we found clear links among specific types of cuteness, purity, and conservatism, revealing important implications for political persuasion and messaging.
Part of our motivation for studying these relationships was that cuteness is ubiquitous now, with adorable puppies, bears, and babies appearing in messaging for everything from sports to toilet paper to political campaigns. By “cute” we specifically mean the attributes of infants—like big eyes, chubby cheeks, round bodies—that elicit a caregiving response, a definition academics have aligned around over the past century.
Marketers have recognized and capitalized on this reality. Case in point: the prototypically cute Hello Kitty brand has generated tens of billions in lifetime retail sales. Cute collectibles like Squishmallows and Popmart’s Labubu dolls trend heavily on social media and were among the most coveted products of 2025.
But the impacts of cuteness don’t seem uniform across groups and individuals. Cuteness draws some people in more than others. To understand why, we drilled into deeper cognitive associations related to the concept of cuteness. Our study, recently published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, featured nine controlled experiments that supported a key finding: conservatives showed a greater preference than liberals for baby-like cute products, and the link was partly explained by the association between that aesthetic and innocence/purity.
We found, in general, that study participants who valued purity preferred cuter versions of a product (e.g., a mug with giant, imploring eyes) to more standard versions. People differ in how much weight they give purity in moral judgments, and conservatives tend to give it more weight than average. Thus, we predicted that conservatives would appreciate cute products more than liberals would.
We collected observations from 3,648 participants across the U.S., U.K., and India and consistently found that political conservatives, on average, like baby-like cute products—mugs, keychains, water bottles, and others—more than political liberals, as measured by purchase intent and other variables. Similarly, we found that the number of searches for cute products (e.g., dresses, toys, bags) on Google Shopping is higher in red states than blue states in the U.S.
Our work shows that moral value systems permeate everyday consumption decisions, often without explicit awareness, and that designing messaging and packaging to reflect a consumer’s moral value system is one way marketers reel in consumers. While our experiments focused on product attitudes, choices, and purchase intentions rather than receptivity to political messages, candidate trust, or voting behavior, the core finding that moral values drive consumers’ basic aesthetic preferences and choices has meaningful consequences for political messaging. The same tips marketers use to design attractive products can be used to craft relevant political messages.
Overall, our research shows that baby-like cuteness is a more powerful attractant for conservative audiences than liberal ones because it signals innocence and purity. This finding is relevant to political strategists, as we’ve discussed, but also to the consumers on the other side of political messages: remember that a cute messenger or mascot shouldn’t substitute for scrutiny of the message itself, especially when it comes to important decisions at the ballot box or in other contexts.