People with autism process information in unusual ways and often have difficulties in their social interactions in everyday life. While this can be especially striking in those who are otherwise high functioning, characterizing this difficulty in detail has been challenging. Now, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have isolated a very specific difference in how high-functioning people with autism think about other people, finding that -- in actuality -- they don't tend to think about what others think of them at all.
This finding, described online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on what researchers call "theory of mind" abilities -- our intuitive skill for figuring out what other people think, intend, and believe. One key aspect of such abilities in terms of social interactions is to be able to figure out what others think of us -- in other words, to know what our social reputation is. It is well known that social reputation usually has a very powerful influence on our behavior, motivating us to be nice to others.
The Caltech team capitalized on this strong effect by asking people to make real money donations to UNICEF under two conditions: alone in a room or while being watched by a researcher.
"What we found in control participants -- people without autism -- basically replicated prior work. People donated more when they were being watched by another person, presumably to improve their social reputation," explains Keise Izuma, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and first author on the study. "By contrast, participants with autism gave the same amount of money regardless of whether they were being watched or not. The effect was extremely clear."
The findings provide a much more precise picture of how people with autism process social information, says Adolphs, and is important not only for use in diagnostic and interventional therapies, but also for educating the general public about the psychology of autism.
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