High-functioning autism (ASD) can cause difficulties in social interactions, even though tests show that people with ASD do have an understanding of another person’s beliefs and intentions. This leads us to think that there is a deficit in the theory of mind (ToM) of ASD patients. Theory of mind is the ability to infer the contents of other people’s minds, including beliefs and intentions. It suggests that these individuals acquire further compensatory reasoning skills that enable them to succeed on explicit measures of theory of mind.

For testing, the experimenters used a unique way to test ToM reasoning in adults. The test directly measured reasoning about beliefs and intentions with quantitative response scales, instead of verbal justifications. The researchers compared ASD patients with neurotypical adults (these are people who weigh a person’s intention more heavily than the outcome of their action).

What are the results from previous studies?

It is important to note that previous studies make clear that ASD and NT individuals possess the same basic understanding of moral right and wrong. Also, both tested groups had a similar IQ, well above average. Also in earlier studies using neuroimaging evidence the association between moral judgment and ToM is supported (e.g. more activation in the right temporoparietal junction predicts greater consideration of the intentions and therefore less blame for accidents; reduced ToM ability in autism is associated with reduced activation of the rTPJ).

What are the hypotheses of this experiment?

The predictions of the current experiment were that 1) ASD individuals would succeed on a standard test of false beliefs, but 2) that ASD individuals should make atypical moral judgments, especially for accidental harms. It is thought that ASD individuals, due to ToM deficits, would neglect the innocent intentions of a person, and therefore assign more moral blame for accidental harm.

The experiment

To test this, two experiments were executed. In experiment 1, ASD and neurotypical participants performed a theory of mind task to test false belief understanding. Participants had to answer questions about stories that proved either their understanding of a person’s false belief (which requires ToM) or a false physical depiction of the world (which doesn’t require ToM). In experiment 2, the same ASD participants and a new group of neurotypical participants judged the moral permissibility of actions that produced either a negative or neutral outcome, based on the belief that the protagonist was causing a negative or neutral outcome. Both the beliefs and intentions (which require ToM) and processing outcomes (which don’t require ToM) had to be processed.

What are the results of this experiment?

There was no difference between groups on the false belief task, but the researchers found a difference when looking at the moral judgment task of accidental harms (so not for the neutral acts, attempted harms or intentional harms). The ASD group (compared to the neurotypical group) judged accidental and attempted harms as not morally different from one another. These participants did not rely on the information about a person’s innocent intention, and as a direct result paid more attention on the action’s negative outcome. This shows that the beliefs and intentions of a person are not taken into account when ASD patients judge a moral action.

What do these results mean? What can further research focus on?

One explanation for these results is that some aspects of ToM might develop later, or never fully, in ASD individuals. Also it is possible that people with ASD develop compensatory mechanisms, which make them able to solve simple false belief tasks but don’t go further than this. The fact that ASD patients weigh beliefs and intentions of other people less than “normal people” could lead to a difficulty for these individuals in their everyday social interactions. This study focused on moral judgments only, but it is likely that the not taking into account of beliefs and intentions applies to other kinds of social judgment as well. Future research should examine this possibility. The current research results are consistent with earlier observations that ASD patients are impaired at implicit but not explicit ToM.