Autism spectrum traits predict higher social psychological skill

Abstract

Social-cognitive skills can take different forms, from accurately predicting individuals’ intentions, emotions, and thoughts (person perception or folk psychology) to accurately predicting social phenomena more generally. Past research has linked autism spectrum (AS) traits to person perception deficits in the general population. We tested whether AS traits also predict poor accuracy in terms of predicting generalized social phenomena, assessed via participants’ accuracy at predicting social psychological phenomena (e.g., social loafing, social projection, group think). We found the opposite. In a sample of ∼6,500 participants in 104 countries, AS traits predicted slightly higher social psychological skill. A second study with 400 participants suggested that heightened systemizing underlies this relationship. Our results indicate that AS traits relate positively to a form of social cognitive skill—predicting social psychological phenomena—and highlight the importance of distinguishing between divergent types of social cognition.

Divergent contributions of autistic traits to social psychological knowledge

“…Following previous theory (9), we suspect that different autistic traits have divergent associations with social psychological knowledge. Indeed, some traits are linked to greater social knowledge in line with Gollwitzer et al (1); however, others are associated with lower scores (Table 1). Broadly speaking, nonsocial traits are linked to better performance, whereas social traits are negatively related to social psychological knowledge.…”

“…We examined Gollwitzer et al’s (1) study on autism and better social psychological knowledge with interest, given its large samples and open dataset. We commend the authors for raising the bar for autism research, which is typically underpowered and rarely draws on social psychology.…”

“…Notwithstanding our enthusiasm for the research, we are surprised that a positive relationship between an autism trait questionnaire and social knowledge is found (1). As the autism questionnaire is a clinical screening tool (6), it measures a wide range of traits (e.g., social understanding, attention to detail), reflecting the fractionation of diagnosable autism (7).…”

Psychometric concerns with the 10-item Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ10) as a measure of trait autism in the general population

“…Recently, there has been an increased use of the AQ10 in large-scale studies to measure autistic traits in the general population. Specifically, overall AQ10 scores are being used to quantify the number of autistic traits/tendencies self-reported by an individual, and then correlated with their performance on other tasks (e.g., social psychological skill [Gollwitzer et al, 2019]).…”

Polygenic risk for autism spectrum disorder associates with anger recognition in a neurodevelopment-focused phenome-wide scan of unaffected youths from a population-based cohort

“…Gollwitzer, et al . demonstrated that the inability of ASD cases to perceive individual intention, emotion, and thoughts is uniquely distinct (and indeed oppositely correlated) from the ability of ASD cases to predict social phenomena more generally [ 30 ]. Importantly, this observation was observed across data from 104 countries suggesting that culturally-driven social norms do not confound this skill.…”