Researchers asked infants of various ages to choose between characters which they had seen behaving well or badly, and found they overwhelmingly favoured the "good" characters.
One-year-old babies who were asked to take treats away from a "naughty" puppet in some cases went so far as to lean over and smack it on the head.
The research, which is being pioneered by a team of psychologists from the Infant Cognition Centre at Yale University, Connecticut, contradicts the belief promoted by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud that babies are born "amoral animals" and acquire a sense of right and wrong through conditioning.
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Paul Bloom, the professor of psychology who heads the study team, said: "A growing body of evidence ... suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.
"With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone."
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Read more: Telegraph