Ever wondered why you can't resist scrolling Instagram? Or why your cat chews your charging cords to get a taste of the plasticizers that keep the insulation pliant? Welcome to the jacked-up world of supernormal stimuli, where Mother Nature's "fake news" has animals (and yes, that includes us) acting like complete buffoons.
As Wikipedia explains, a supernormal stimulus is an "exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency." In other words, it's nature's way of cranking everything up to 11, making stuff so irresistible that our animal brains short-circuit. The entire animal kingdom is getting catfished left and right by exaggerated versions of their evolutionary turn-ons. It's like nature's version of those social media filters that make your eyes twice as big and your skin smoother than a wet ShamWow. And just like your friend who keeps falling for obvious scams, animals can't seem to resist these biological clickbaits.
Examples of creatures falling for nature's Photoshop filters:
• Horny beetles trying to mate with beer bottles
• Birds abandoning their own eggs to sit on larger, more colorful fakes
• Male stickleback fish attacking wooden floats with extra-red undersides
• Small songbirds preferring to sit on freakishly large, polka-dotted eggs
• Humans drooling over surgically enhanced body parts
And just because you are a Homo sapiens sapiens, don't think you can ignore supernormal stimuli. As Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett notes, these stimuli "govern the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of other animals."
So next time you see a bird trying to mate with a traffic cone or a moth slamming itself into a porch light, remember: we're all just victims of nature's most successful marketing campaign.
Previously:
• Why we love food porn
