Impaired theory of mind for moral judgment in high-functioning autism

Abstract

High-functioning autism (ASD) is characterized by real-life difficulties in social interaction; however, these individuals often succeed on laboratory tests that require an understanding of another person's beliefs and intentions. This paradox suggests a theory of mind (ToM) deficit in adults with ASD that has yet to be demonstrated in an experimental task eliciting ToM judgments. We tested whether ASD adults would show atypical moral judgments when they need to consider both the intentions (based on ToM) and outcomes of a person's actions. In experiment 1, ASD and neurotypical (NT) participants performed a ToM task designed to test false belief understanding. In experiment 2, the same ASD participants and a new group of NT participants judged the moral permissibility of actions, in a 2 (intention: neutral/negative) × 2 (outcome: neutral/negative) design. Though there was no difference between groups on the false belief task, there was a selective difference in the moral judgment task for judgments of accidental harms, but not neutral acts, attempted harms, or intentional harms. Unlike the NT group, which judged accidental harms less morally wrong than attempted harms, the ASD group did not reliably judge accidental and attempted harms as morally different. In judging accidental harms, ASD participants appeared to show an underreliance on information about a person's innocent intention and, as a direct result, an overreliance on the action's negative outcome. These findings reveal impairments in integrating mental state information (e.g., beliefs, intentions) for moral judgment.

Moral judgment in adults with autism spectrum disorders

“…Importantly, however, these individuals succeeded in ToM tasks. To account for such apparently paradoxical results, Moran et al (2011) hypothesized that adults with high-functioning autism may be able to encode others' mental states, but have difficulties in using such information in concert with other types of information.…”

Moral cognition in schizophrenia

“…For example, irrespective of ToM impairments, when presented with simple transgressions, children with ASD make similar distinctions between moral and conventional transgressions (Blair, 1996) and moral judgements to typically developing children (Leslie, Mallon, & Dicorcia, 2006). However, individuals with ASD are more likely to explain the wrongness of moral transgressions via reference to rules rather than the welfare of victims and are also less likely to incorporate information about intention into their moral judgements of more complex moral transgressions, for example, by indicating that harmful accidents are worse than less harmful intentional acts (Grant, Boucher, Riggs, & Grayson, 2005;Moran et al, 2011;Shulman, Guberman, Shiling, & Bauminger, 2012;Zalla, Barlassina, Buon, & Leboyer, 2011).…”

Approximating Implicit and Explicit Mentalizing with Two Naturalistic Video-Based Tasks in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…In those direct mentalizing tasks, participants are asked to infer a protagonist's mental state from stories (Happé 1993(Happé , 1994Moran et al 2011), photographs of persons' eye regions , or from film scenes displaying social interactions (Dziobek et al 2006).…”