Born to Care. How Newborns React to Kindness

An early sense of social life
From their very first days, newborn babies show a surprising sensitivity to the social world around them. While they can't speak or walk, their eyes reveal a lot about what they find interesting.

Researchers have long debated whether our sense of right and wrong is shaped entirely by experience or whether some moral instincts are built in by evolution.

New studies now suggest that even at just a few days old, babies pay more attention to kind, helpful behaviors than to unkind or antisocial ones.

This early preference could mean that humans are biologically predisposed to notice and value cooperation long before they understand the concept of morality.

Watching kindness in action
To test this idea, scientists showed newborns, only 4–7 days old, some simple animated videos where two shapes interacted.

In one version, a shape approached another gently, while in another, it avoided contact. Later, a more complex version showed one shape helping another move up a slope, or blocking it from progressing.

Despite being just days old, the babies spent more time watching the helpful interactions than the unhelpful ones. They didn't show this preference when the videos used non-social shapes or movements, suggesting they weren’t just reacting to visual differences but to the social meaning behind the actions.

This kind of attention to social behavior, especially helpfulness, points to an early, possibly inborn sensitivity to cooperative acts. That's a nice thought...

Built-in attention to social signals
These results are part of a broader trend in infant research.

Even newborns prefer looking at faces over scrambled images, and they react more to direct gaze than averted eyes. They seem naturally drawn to human-like movement and are more distressed by another baby's cry than by other sounds.

All of this suggests that babies arrive equipped with tools to detect and engage socially, long before they have the language or life experience to understand them.

The new study adds to this by showing that babies might also be naturally equipped to understand whether a social interaction is friendly or hostile.

Is it moral or just social?
While it might be tempting to say these findings prove babies are born with a moral compass, that’s probably an overstatement.

Most likely, the newborns are responding to social alignment rather than moral value. For example, they might prefer agents who move together or act with the same goals, rather than truly evaluating who is "good" or "bad."

Still, the fact that they show this sensitivity so early suggests that social perception is deeply rooted in human biology. Whether this represents the earliest responses to morality or is merely a social reflex is a question for future research.

While that discussion is academic, it does not change the fact that the ability to distinguish helpful from harmful behavior seems to come online surprisingly fast.

The brain behind the baby's gaze
How do such young infants manage this? The answer may lie in how the human visual system is structured.

Studies suggest that brain regions in babies responsible for processing movement and body positions also handle social information like who is helping whom or who is facing whom.

Even in adults, parts of our visual brain, like the posterior superior temporal sulcus, are particularly active when we watch social interactions unfold. These areas are present and active in infants, too, indicating that the roots of social understanding might begin with basic visual perception.

Rather than needing to think through moral scenarios, babies may simply "see" social meaning, thanks to specialized brain systems that pick up on subtle interaction cues.

This design in our brains' visual system could be the foundation upon which more complex social and moral understanding is built as babies grow.

About the paper that inspired

First Author: Alessandra Geraci, Italy
Published: Nature Communications, July 2025
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61517-3

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