“Why do you study whales?”
“Because they’re huge and I love them!”
Perfect answer. No padding. The attraction to the subject is obvious.
Then someone asks the dangerous follow-up:
“Why do you like huge things?”
Suddenly the simple answer becomes difficult.
Because huge things are great. End of story.
Except curiosity keeps drilling.
What exactly happens when we see something enormous?
A surprisingly good description is:
“Wait, that thing is alive? That’s terrifying. That’s amazing.”
Now we are in psychology.
And then comes the worst possible transfer:
“So you like big things. Does that mean you also prefer bigger breasts?”
The horny transfer professor has entered the seminar.
Ridiculous question. Surprisingly testable hypothesis.
1. “Terrifying, amazing” is very close to what psychology calls awe
Keltner and Haidt’s classic account of awe proposed two central appraisals.
The first is vastness: encountering something physically, socially, or conceptually much larger than the self.
The second is need for accommodation: the experience does not fit comfortably inside your existing mental model, so that model has to adjust.
A whale is not merely “a large animal.”
The reaction is closer to:
“How can that much living mass exist?”
“How does something that size move under its own power?”
“Why is a creature several orders of magnitude larger than my everyday animals casually swimming around?”
The normal scale of “living thing” breaks.
That is why admiration and a little fear can coexist.
A Japanese validation of the Awe Experience Scale also recovered multiple dimensions including vastness, accommodation, self-loss, connectedness, time perception, and physiological reactions.
So “How is that thing even alive? Scary. Amazing.” is not an unserious reaction. It lands near the center of the psychology of awe.
2. Large animals really do raise both fear and admiration
A 2024 People and Nature study surveyed 549 people in Slovakia and measured fear and admiration toward large and small animals and non-animal objects.
Large animals produced stronger fear and admiration than smaller animals.
More interestingly, responses crossed domains. In the structural equation model, admiration of non-animal objects predicted admiration of animals with β=0.622, and fear of non-animal objects predicted fear of animals with β=0.729.
That does not prove a universal “big-things gene.”
It was one online sample from one country using a particular stimulus set.
But it does support a narrower claim:
People who react strongly to huge non-animal things may also tend to react strongly to huge animals.
The whale reaction is not necessarily whale-specific. Size itself can be part of the emotional trigger.
3. Does that general preference for largeness reach sexual body preferences?
Now the professor raises a hand.
“If admiration for huge animals and huge structures is partly shared, perhaps people who like largeness also prefer larger bodily features?”
That is a legitimate hypothesis.
But in the literature checked for this article, we did not find a study that directly measured general attraction to huge objects and breast-size preference in the same participants.
That missing link matters.
Whales are huge → some people have stronger cross-domain reactions to huge things → therefore those people prefer larger breasts
The final arrow has not been established.
Large-animal and large-object reactions have some evidence of shared variance.
Sexual attractiveness judgments, however, have many additional inputs.
The English word “big” may be the same. The psychological computation does not have to be.
4. Breast-size preferences are already highly context-dependent
Research on adult men’s breast-size preferences does not produce a simple “bigger is always better” rule.
A 2017 comparison across Brazil, Cameroon, the Czech Republic, and Namibia found significant differences between cultures. Medium size was the most frequently preferred option in Brazil and the Czech Republic, and also the most frequent in Namibia, although that result was statistically borderline.
A 2013 paper tested 266 men across socioeconomic contexts in Malaysia and also compared hungry and satiated men in Britain. Men facing greater relative resource insecurity rated larger breasts as more attractive, and hungry men preferred larger sizes more than satiated men.
A 2011 study of 128 adult men examined sociosexual orientation, meaning openness to lower-commitment sexual relationships. More unrestricted men tended to rate larger sizes more positively, but both groups gave high ratings to medium-to-large sizes. “Maximum size wins” was not the result.
A 2026 study with 277 men again reported a weak positive correlation between more unrestricted sociosexuality and preference for larger breasts.
So existing work points to influences such as:
- culture
- resource security
- temporary hunger
- sociosexuality
- stimulus shape and presentation
Whale size alone is not doing the explanatory work.
5. So “likes huge things = likes larger breasts” is currently untested
The most accurate answer is:
There appears to be some cross-domain individual variation in fear and admiration of largeness.
But:
We do not yet know whether that variation generalizes into sexual preferences for body-part size.
A giant whale can trigger scale contrast, threat potential, impossible-seeming living mass, and cognitive surprise.
Adult sexual attractiveness judgments add social, cultural, and sexual meaning.
A common factor could exist.
It could also be zero.
That’s actually an empirical question.
The joke has accidentally become a real research question.
6. If we were actually going to study it, here is the design
First, recruit adults and measure reactions to largeness across several domains:
- whales, elephants, and other large animals
- giant trees
- mountains, enormous waves, and waterfalls
- skyscrapers and large bridges
For each, measure separately:
- liking
- admiration
- awe
- fear
- desire to see more
Do not reduce “likes big things” to a single item.
Then measure adult preferences for body-feature size using stimuli that control as much as possible for body build, BMI, shape, posture, and other confounds.
Collect prespecified covariates such as:
- age
- gender
- sexual orientation
- cultural background
- sociosexuality
- resource insecurity
- hunger
- potentially relevant traits such as openness or sensation seeking
Preregister the main hypotheses.
H1: admiration for large animals correlates positively with admiration for large non-animal objects.
H2: test whether a general largeness-affinity factor predicts body-size preferences.
H3: if an association exists, test whether awe, fear, or admiration accounts for it.
Most importantly, do not define H2 as “obviously true.”
A null result is still a result.
“Whales and breasts use different psychological circuits despite both being called big” would be a perfectly good outcome.
7. The real scientific fun begins one level below “because I like it”
The first answer was:
“Because it’s huge.”
That is not shallow.
Preferences often contain fast emotional responses that arrive before a person has a neat verbal explanation.
Ask one more question—
“Why does huge feel good?”
—and the answer may decompose into:
“It breaks my sense of scale.”
“It dwarfs me.”
“It is scary but I want to keep looking.”
“I cannot believe something that size is alive.”
Ask whether the same response appears in other domains, and you have an individual-differences question.
Ask whether it transfers into sexual size preferences, and you reach an area where the literature is still incomplete.
The professor is annoying.
But research often starts with exactly that kind of “Do you really need to ask that?” question.
Conclusion: Professor, Do the Study
Whales are huge and that is part of why they are fascinating.
Why?
“How is that thing alive? Scary. Amazing.”
Psychologically, that answer is coherent. Vastness is central to awe, large animals tend to increase both fear and admiration, and reactions to huge non-animal things and huge animals can covary.
But the next question—
“Do people who love huge things also prefer larger breasts?”—
is still unresolved.
We know that breast-size preferences vary with culture, resource conditions, sociosexuality, and other factors. We do not yet have direct evidence that a general preference for huge things predicts them.
So the horny transfer professor asked a sloppy question and somehow discovered a viable research gap.
At this point there is only one response:
Do the study.
References
- Keltner D, Haidt J. 2003. Cognition and Emotion 17(2):297-314. DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297
- Japanese AWE-S validation study. PMID: 37900197. PMCID: PMC10611950
- Prokop P, et al. 2024. People and Nature 6:945-957. DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10504
- Evolution and Human Behavior 38(2):217-226. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.10.002
- Swami V, Tovée MJ. 2013. PLoS ONE 8(3):e57623. PMID: 23483919. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0057623
- Zelazniewicz AM, Pawlowski B. 2011. Archives of Sexual Behavior 40:1129-1135. PMID: 21975921. DOI: 10.1007/s10508-011-9850-1
- Frontiers in Psychology. 2026. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1797201
