STORY

Why We Love Big Things

An enormous lobster should not matter to us. Neither should a giant banana or a fish the size of a small building. Yet we stop, photograph them and remember them for years. Why?
Story
Published
By Project Big Things Editorial
Updated 26 October 2026 · Facts checked 20 October 2026
AI assistance: AI tools assisted with research and drafting. The Publisher and Editor reviewed, fact-checked and approved the article. How we work
Nobody drives several kilometres out of their way to see a normal-sized banana.
And yet, make that banana several metres long, put it beside a highway, and suddenly it becomes a destination. People stop their cars, gather the family, take photographs and remember the visit years later.
The same thing happens with enormous lobsters, oversized shoes, giant fish and practically anything else somebody has decided to make ridiculously large.
It's a peculiar form of tourism. The attraction might not be particularly beautiful. Sometimes it isn't even very good.
And yet, we love it.
Why?
The answer involves some surprisingly serious ideas about humour, psychology, memory and our relationships with places. None completely explains Big Things on its own, but together they suggest why these apparently silly landmarks can become unexpectedly meaningful.

A perfectly ordinary thing, behaving very strangely

We know how large a pineapple should be. We understand roughly how much space a chair occupies. We rarely need to think about these dimensions because the objects are so familiar.
A Big Thing breaks that expectation.
Historian Amy Clarke has studied oversized roadside landmarks across Australia, Canada and the United States. Her research examines how familiar objects become spectacles through exaggerated scale, and how these structures acquire cultural meaning beyond their initial purpose.[1]
Psychologists call a mismatch between what we expect and what we encounter incongruity. The concept also matters to theories of humour. In experiments on what makes things funny, Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw investigated how an apparent violation of expectations can be experienced as amusing when it is also understood to be benign.[2]
This research did not involve giant bananas. But it offers a plausible explanation for our response.
Nothing dangerous has happened. Someone has simply taken a familiar object and made it absurdly big.
It's a joke you can see from the highway. And unusually for a joke, nobody needs to explain the punchline.

They make us smile without asking very much of us

You don't need to understand art history to appreciate a giant strawberry. You don't need a guided tour to understand why an oversized lobster is amusing. You don't even need to speak the local language.
You just need to recognise the object.
A child and a grandparent can stand in front of the same Big Thing and immediately understand what makes it unusual.
A grand monument might invite solemn reflection. A museum exhibit might require concentration. A Big Thing generally asks very little beyond looking up and perhaps smiling.
Of course, some Big Things are remarkable works of sculpture and engineering. Others are decidedly homemade. Their appeal doesn't always depend on perfection.
The world has plenty of things we're expected to admire. It's rather nice to encounter something we can simply enjoy.

A little surprise goes a long way

One promising explanation comes from research into how we remember travel.
Tourism researchers Liubov Skavronskaya, Brent Moyle and Noel Scott studied 75 remembered travel episodes and explored how novelty can attract attention and help experiences become memorable.[3] Another influential study of memorable tourism experiences identified novelty, involvement and social interaction among the relevant dimensions of travel memory.[4]
Neither study establishes a special psychological effect unique to Big Things. But the findings suggest why a short roadside stop can linger long after much of the journey has blurred together.
You might forget where you stopped for fuel or which town had the expensive lunch.
But the enormous lobster?
You remember that.
A Big Thing interrupts the ordinary rhythm of travel. It gives the journey an identifiable moment: something unexpected, easily described and worth talking about afterwards.
It becomes a landmark in your memory as well as a landmark beside the road.

Eventually, the strange becomes familiar

The first time you see a Big Thing, it might be funny because it's unexpected.
The next time, you might stop because you remember enjoying it.
Years later, it may have become part of your family's story.
Clarke has identified nostalgia and regional identity as important reasons people become attached to Big Things. In an ABC News interview about Adaminaby's Big Trout, she reflected on childhood road trips and the way an out-of-the-ordinary landmark breaks the monotony of a long drive.[5]
The Big Trout provides an unusually moving example.
When the enormous fish was restored in 2023, ABC journalist Floss Adams spoke with Wendy Watson, who remembered visiting it during childhood with her keen trout-fishing father. Her family had taken photographs there repeatedly, including a Polaroid from 1978. By the time of the restoration, three generations had posed in front of the same fish.[5]
The trout itself was still an oversized rainbow trout.
But the memories surrounding it had grown.
What began as an unusual roadside stop had become part of a family's history.
The first visit was about seeing something strange. Later visits were about remembering something familiar.

We like having proof that we were there

We rarely seem content just to look at Big Things.
We stand beside them, pose underneath them, pretend to hold them up and gather the children for a photograph. Sometimes the picture is almost identical to one taken decades earlier.
The attraction becomes a stage on which a small part of our own story takes place.
The study of memorable tourism experiences suggests that what people do during travel matters alongside what they see.[4] Big Things are especially easy to turn into shared activities. They provide an instantly recognisable backdrop, and the photograph makes an almost effortless souvenir.
This habit long predates social media. Wendy Watson's family's 1978 trout photograph makes that point more eloquently than any theory about Instagram could.[5]
You haven't merely seen the Big Thing.
You've been there.

One is a novelty. Twenty is a collection.

For some people, Big Things become more than occasional roadside stops.
Once you've visited a few, you start noticing the ones you've missed. Someone mentions a giant animal in the next region. A map reveals an extraordinary object a little way off the planned route.
Before long, you're considering a detour that would sound ridiculous if explained to somebody who has never felt the appeal.
Each Big Thing is distinctive and geographically fixed. It is possible to visit, remember and collect them as experiences. The giant object supplies the excuse; the journey supplies the rest.
One Big Thing is a novelty.
Twenty Big Things is a quest.
That is an observation about visitor behaviour, not a claim that psychologists have established a universal collecting instinct for oversized landmarks.

Bigger isn't always better. But it is different.

Does size itself explain our fascination?
Only partly.
Enormous buildings, vast landscapes and monumental artworks can provoke awe. But it would be a stretch to claim that seeing a giant prawn necessarily produces the same experience as standing beneath a mountain.
Big Things combine exaggerated scale with familiarity and, frequently, humour.
A mountain is impressive because mountains are huge.
A huge apple is surprising because apples aren't.
The important thing isn't simply that the object is large. It's that we already know how small it ought to be.

Eventually, they belong to us

Some Big Things outlive the businesses or promotional campaigns that originally justified them. They may come to represent a town even when their original purpose is little remembered.
Clarke's comparative research on Australia and Canada shows how such landmarks can express regional identities and the things local communities value.[6]
The Big Trout's 2023 restoration is one tangible example. As the ABC reported, the project involved significant public investment and local attachment to an object that had become deeply associated with Adaminaby.[5]
At some point, the question stops being, “Why is there an enormous fish here?”
It becomes, “How could this town be the same without it?”
A large roadside object has accumulated stories. The affection people feel is no longer just about the object.
It's about the place, the people and the memories.

Perhaps we need a little ridiculousness

There probably isn't one psychological explanation for why we love Big Things. Research specifically investigating these structures remains relatively young, and broader findings about humour and travel memory must be applied carefully rather than treated as proof.
But the connections are persuasive.
We enjoy surprises. We appreciate things that make us laugh. We remember experiences that interrupt the ordinary. We like sharing discoveries with people we care about. We grow attached to places and objects that become part of our own histories.
Big Things can do all of those things while asking remarkably little of us.
They don't need to be important. They don't need to be beautiful. They don't even need to make very much sense.
Somebody only has to look at an entirely ordinary object and decide the world would be more interesting if it were enormous.
And perhaps that's the simplest explanation of all.
Big Things remind us that the world doesn't always have to be sensible to be worth exploring.
Sometimes, an enormous lobster is reason enough to stop.

Sources

2.
Differentiating What Is Humorous From What Is Not, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Accessed 20 October 2026.
3.
The Experience of Novelty and the Novelty of Experience, Frontiers in Psychology. Accessed 20 October 2026.
4.
Development of a Scale to Measure Memorable Tourism Experiences, Journal of Travel Research. Accessed 20 October 2026.

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