Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans establish and maintain complex cooperative interactions with unrelated individuals by exploiting various cognitive mechanisms, for instance empathic reactions and a preference for prosocial actions and individuals over antisocial ones. The key role played by these features across human sociomoral systems suggests that core processes underpinning them may be evolved adaptations. Initial evidence consistent with this view came from studies on preverbal infants, which found a preference for prosocial over antisocial individuals. In this study, 5-day-old neonates were shown pairs of looping video interactions in which a prosocial event (approach in Experiment 1, helping in Experiments 2 and 3) appeared on one side of the display and an antisocial event (avoidance in Experiment 1, hindering in Experiments 2 and 3) appeared on the other; newborns' attention to each event type was measured. Across 3 experiments, newborns consistently looked longer at the prosocial than the antisocial events, but only during socially interactive versions of the stimuli. Together, these findings suggest that basic mechanisms to distinguish simple prosocial versus antisocial acts, and to prefer prosocial ones, emerge with very limited experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".