杏吧原创

It appears that humans find larger animals more charismatic than smaller ones 鈥� although some exceptionally small species punch above their weight when it comes to charisma.

There are several recognised kinds of animal charisma: aesthetic, the innate response by humans to an animal鈥檚 appearance; ecological, how notable an animal is based on the likelihood that it will be encountered by humans; and corporeal, the emotions inspired by an animal in groups of people with lived experience of the species.

There are already a number of datasets that have measured animal charisma. Some involved surveying volunteers about their attitude towards particular species of birds and mammals, others involved assessing data on the number of Wikipedia page views for a particular species, and the number of images of the species posted to Twitter and the photo-sharing site Flickr.

Emilio Berti 鈥� formerly at Aarhus University in Denmark 鈥� and his colleagues pooled together the information from nine of these existing datasets. This allowed them to assess the charisma of 13,680 animal species, including amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles.

The researchers came up with a standardised measure of charisma between 0 and 1 for each species based on their rankings within the respective datasets.

Having completed the analysis, Berti and his colleagues found there was a correlation between charisma ratings and animal size.聽This was measured as the average adult body size for birds and mammals, which typically stop growing when they reach sexual maturity, and the maximum adult body mass for amphibians and reptiles,聽.

鈥淭he bigger you get, the more sublime reaction humans have,鈥� says Berti.

However, the researchers found that a few of the smallest species also had a very high charisma rating. These included the Virgin Islands dwarf gecko (Sphaerodactylus parthenopion), which is one of the smallest terrestrial vertebrates at 18 millimetres long.

Berti says that extremely small species may also evoke strong positive reactions in people, potentially as a result of their perceived cuteness.