It's possible something like that is at the root of the remarkable capacity of humans for kindness and cooperation and mutual aid, even involving strangers and aliens, and visible in even very young children.
Humans are a pack-social species like most of the other apes as well as many other species such as wolves/dogs. Harmony and cooperation among pack-mates makes life easier for all, and in hard times it can mean the difference between survival and extinction. So naturally we have the instinct to help, protect and care for our pack-mates, as do most of those other pack-social species.
However, we are undergoing a transition to a herd-social species, living in harmony and cooperation with anonymous strangers like cattle and pigeons. While this new harmony and cooperation requires overriding our instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior, something we can do because of our uniquely massive forebrains, I see plenty of evidence that our instincts may be slowly evolving to adapt to the civilized herd we have created for ourselves.
This is not remarkable, since this has clearly happened to dogs over roughly the same timespan, the 15,000 years since they began living with us and forming a multi-species community. Dogs and wolves, a single species, have considerably different social instincts. Dogs are indeed in many ways becoming herd-social instead of pack-social, tolerating and even welcoming the company of strangers, even strangers of other species.
Humans, in the 10,000 years since we invented agriculture and were required to live in larger communities, seem to be on the same path as dogs. As I pointed out in another thread, Americans wept for Neda, a member of a distant "pack" that we've all been taught to hate by propaganda and a few unfortunate events. Could this have happened five thousand years ago? Ten thousand?