Sharing cute animal posts? Science finds they can strengthen your relationship!

You've probably done it a hundred times: spotted an adorable cat or dog video, thought of a friend, and hit send without a second thought. Don’t hold back. Send as many cute animal photos, videos, and memes as you can to your friends. Turns out, this simple act is actually improving your bond with them. A paper published by Concordia researchers found that this simple gesture is strengthening interpersonal relationships. The findings of the study are published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Sharing those clumsy pandas, fuzzy kittens, hilarious puppies, and grinning chimps is actually benefiting you. The researchers found that sharing animal photos and videos, often with a cute hashtag or humorous text, creates a ‘digital affective encounter’, which is an online experience that elicits positive feelings. The researchers compare this behavior to something that happens in nature: when certain penguin species exchange pebbles as tokens during courtship. Just as those pebbles symbolize care and affection, our animal posts function as digital love languages, signaling that we value our relationships.“Pebbling is a behaviour practised by Gentoo penguins who present pebbles to desired mates as tokens of affection. Our research observes a similar behaviour in humans interacting on social media,” Prof Ghalia Shamayleh, who led the study, told BBC Science Focus.According to the authors, this exchange of animal content is not just about the circulation of the content, but helps create and maintain connections between people online.“The creation, consumption, and circulation of animal photos has become a social phenomenon. It has gone well beyond animals advertising animal products,” co-author Zeynep Arsel, a professor in the Department of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business, said. The paper is built on the MSc thesis of Ghalia Shamayleh (MSc 19, PhD 24), who is now an assistant professor at the ESSEC Business School outside Paris, France. To understand this trend, researchers created a model to show how content is made and shared, mainly on Instagram. They also interviewed creators and managers of animal pages and followers, and used their experiences with their own animal companions, to understand how an image makes its way across a digital affective network.The first step is indexicalization. This means adding emotion to an animal photo or video, like captions, hashtags, outfits, or jokes, to show your bond with the animal. This turns the relationship into a digital post. Sharing it with a small group or person is like a small, personal gesture, a form of pebbling.Next comes re-indexicalization. Once the post is shared, people interact with it, and new meanings get added. These emotions are understood mainly by that specific group, based on shared experiences. This creates a sense of connection between viewers and the animal.The final step is decontextualization. In this stage, the personalized information is stripped to appeal to a broad audience. People curate and create cultural references, turning animal posts into relatable memes that spread far beyond the original group.The researchers noted that, though this paper is focused exclusively on animal content, the framework it describes applies to other fields, including content depicting delicious food or cute children.“This paper has societal implications in the sense that it explains something that we do very often and usually without question. We wanted to uncover this hidden network, and it all starts with content creators,” Arsel added.