It's only animacy (but I like it): An alternative view on the origins of socio-moral cognition

The early emergence of socio-moral preferences in infancy has generated intense debate within developmental psychology. A central question concerns whether infants' selective responses to prosocial and antisocial agents reflect an innate moral core or can be more parsimoniously explained by domain-general perceptual mechanisms. Although a growing body of evidence indicates that young infants evaluate social interactions, most findings derive from studies conducted after several months of postnatal experience, leaving open questions about the origins of these capacities. Newborn research offers a critical opportunity to address this issue by examining the earliest foundations of social cognition. Here we revisit the debate on the socio-moral cognition origins within a broader developmental framework, drawing parallels with research on face perception and animacy perception. These domains have historically been interpreted both as evidence for innate, domain-specific mechanisms, and in terms of early-emerging perceptual constraints that guide attention toward structured, coherent, and biologically relevant stimuli. Based on behavioral evidence from newborn studies, we argue that early preferences for prosocial interactions may reflect sensitivity to low-level perceptual cues related to animacy, coherence, and interactional structure rather than the operation of abstract moral representations. Overall, we highlight the role of early perceptual and attentional mechanisms as building blocks for later socio-moral cognition, emphasizing developmental continuity between early sensitivities and the gradual emergence of moral concepts through experience and learning.