Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

Abstract

This study investigated hypothetical moral choices in adults with high-functioning autism and the role of empathy and alexithymia in such choices. We used a highly emotionally salient moral dilemma task to investigate autistics' hypothetical moral evaluations about personally carrying out harmful utilitarian behaviours aimed at maximizing welfare. Results showed that they exhibited a normal pattern of moral judgments despite the deficits in social cognition and emotional processing. Further analyses revealed that this was due to mutually conflicting biases associated with autistic and alexithymic traits after accounting for shared variance: (a) autistic traits were associated with reduced utilitarian bias due to elevated personal distress of demanding social situations, while (b) alexithymic traits were associated with increased utilitarian bias on account of reduced empathic concern for the victim. Additionally, autistics relied on their non-verbal reasoning skills to rigidly abide by harm-norms. Thus, utilitarian moral judgments in autism were spared due to opposite influences of autistic and alexithymic traits and compensatory intellectual strategies. These findings demonstrate the importance of empathy and alexithymia in autistic moral cognition and have methodological implications for studying moral judgments in several other clinical populations.

Oxford Faydacılık Ölçeğı’nin Türk Kültürüne Uyarlama Çalışmasının Psikometrik Özellikleri

“…In contrast to original study, it was found that impartial beneficence was positively correlated with psychopathy while instrumental harm negatively correlated with psychopathy. As mentioned before generally psychopathy was found to be positively and empathy was found to be correlated negatively with utilitarianism in the literature (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011;Carmona-Perera, Verdejo-García, Young, Molina-Fernandez, & Pérez-García, 2012;Duke & Bègue 2014;Gleichgerrcht & Young, 2013;Kahane et al, 2015;Gleichgerrcht & Young, 2013;Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, & Savulescu, 2015;Koenigs, Kruepke, Zeier, & Newman, 2012;Patil, Melsbach, Hennig-Fast & Silani, 2016). In their scale validation study Kahane et al (2017) aimed to differentiate utilitarianism in two dimensions.…”

Morality in autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review

“…Gleichgerrcht and colleagues (2013) found that when asked how strongly they felt about their decisions, autistic adults reported greater emotional arousal following trolley decisions and less emotional arousal following footbridge decisions compared with neurotypical participants. Patil and colleagues (2016) asked participants how emotionally arousing they found the scenarios (not their decisions) and found that autistic adults reported more emotional arousal than neurotypical participants regardless of the dilemma type. Patil and colleagues (2016) added a measure of alexithymia and conducted a path analysis of the autistic participants’ data to further investigate responses to the footbridge dilemma.…”

“…Representing internal states of others requires an understanding of those states as distinct from one's own, i.e., theory of mind, or mentalizing (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Despite autistic individuals' ability to attribute mental states to others during theory of mind tasks (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), mentalizing has been found to be less automatic among this population, suggesting a compensatory cognitive strategy for mentalizing (e.g., verbal reasoning skills: Senju, Southgate, White, & Frith, 2009; or nonverbal reasoning skills: Patil, Melsbach, Hennig-Fast, & Silani, 2016). Development and execution of rationalist moral judgement therefore requires psychological processes and cognitive skills that could be atypical among autistic individuals.…”

“…In Gleichgerrcht and colleagues' (2013) study, autistic individuals were more likely than neurotypical individuals to endorse the utilitarian solution to the footbridge dilemma. In contrast, Patil and colleagues (2016) did not find differences in responses to the footbridge dilemma across groups, despite the fact that autistic adults reported more arousal than neurotypical participants in response to both the trolley and footbridge dilemmas (Patil et al, 2016). Gleichgerrcht and colleagues (2013) reasoned that less emotional responding to the footbridge dilemma and differences in commonsense psychology led to the between-group differences in moral decision making.…”

“…for their shared variance, the two have different associations with actions in footbridge-style scenarios. Nonverbal IQ was negatively predictive of utilitarian moral judgments when controlling for autistic and alexithymic traits (Patil et al, 2016). Hirvelä and Helkama (2011) explored the connection between self-reported empathy and moral values in autistic adults and neurotypical controls using online surveys (see Table 5).…”