Baby social behavior: study finds boys and girls equally social at birth

A systematic review and meta-analysis of decades of neonatal research found no significant difference between newborn boys and girls in attention to faces and other social stimuli, drawing on roughly 40 experiments and nearly 2,000 infants.

Researchers combined decades of published neonatal studies to test whether newborn boys and girls differ in attention to people. They searched medical and psychological databases for studies from the 1960s onward that reported results separately by gender. The team identified 40 experiments in 31 peer‑reviewed papers and used meta-analysis where samples were large enough. The overall finding was that newborn boys and girls showed nearly identical attention to social stimuli. Key findings: - Scope of the review: 40 experiments reported in 31 studies, involving nearly 2,000 infants in total. - Face-looking meta-analysis: 667 infants (about half boys and half girls) showed no significant gender difference in gaze duration at a single face or in preference between two faces. - Contagious crying: a meta-analysis of nine experiments including 387 infants found no reliable male–female difference in newborns’ tendency to cry in response to another baby’s crying. - Brazelton assessment results: across four studies with 619 infants, girls paid somewhat more attention to both social and inanimate stimuli, a pattern the authors interpret as a general maturity advantage rather than a special preference for people. - Source and disclosure: the article is republished from The Conversation and was written by Lise Eliot, who reports receiving research funding from the Fred B. Snite Foundation. Summary: The review challenges the idea that newborn boys are inherently less social than girls and reports that both sexes are primed to attend to faces and voices at birth. It also finds no consistent difference in contagious crying and notes mixed results on broader newborn assessments that may reflect general maturity differences. Undetermined at this time.