When you think of a military general, the descriptor “cute” probably doesn’t come to mind. 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.
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