Imputación de culpa entre personas con desorden del desarrollo

Abstract

We synthesize the main findings from two studies that examined moral judgement abilities in people with autism, and in people with Down syndrome. In both studies, the way these people mentally combine information about the intent of a harmful act and the severity of its consequences when attributing blame to an offender was compared with that of typically developing controls. Adolescents and adults with autism or with Down syndrome were, practically to the same extent as controls, able to take into account both information pieces for attributing blame. It would be an exaggeration to imply that adolescents and adults with either autism or Down syndrome are severely immature in moral judgement based on the fact that they are usually not able to explain or justify their judgements with sophisticated philosophical arguments. By contrast, children with autism blame attribution appeared to be essentially based on consequence information. The finding that adolescents and adults with autism or Down syndrome are able to make moral judgements in a way that is not very different from adolescents and adults of the same age could influence the way these people are perceived, cared for, and attributed basic rights. KeywordsMoral Judgments, Autism, Down Syndrome, Offender. RESUMENSintetizamos las principales conclusiones de dos estudios que examinaron la capacidad de juicio moral en personas con autismo y en personas con síndrome de Down. En ambos estudios, la forma en que estas personas combinan mentalmente la información acerca de la intención que puede haber en un acto perjudicial y la gravedad de sus consecuencias cuando se atribuye la culpa a un delincuente, se comparó con la de un grupo control (con desarrollo normal). Adolescentes y adultos con autismo o con síndrome de Down fueron, prácticamente de la misma medida que los del grupo control, capaces de tener en cuenta ambas piezas de información para atribuir la culpa. Sería una exageración asegurar que los adolescentes y los adultos, ya sea con autismo o síndrome de Down son severamente inmaduros en sus juicios morales basado en el hecho de que por lo general no son capaces de explicar o justificar sus juicios con argumentos filosóficos sofisticados. Por el contrario, los niños con autismo que realizaron atribución de culpa parecían basarse esencialmente en la información sobre la consecuencia. El hallazgo de que los adolescentes y adultos con autismo o síndrome de Down son capaces de hacer juicios morales de una manera que no es muy diferente

Perspective Taking Abilities among Persons with Autism: A Preliminary Study

“…Our hypothesis was that, when information regarding suitability, price and persons' purchasing habits are provided, participants with autism would be able to take into account suitability and price information into their judgments, but they would not be able to change to the same extent as controls, the weight attributed to price as a function of what has been indicated of the other person's general propensity to buy. The first part of this hypothesis was based on Mullet's (2011, see also Morales &Rogé, 2016) findings showing that in judgments tasks, persons with autism use the available information in the same way than controls of the same developmental level (except in the case of intentionality information).The second part of the hypothesis was based on previous findings showing relative impairment in cognitive perspective taking among persons with autism (Au-Yeung et al, 2014;LeBlanc et al, 2003;MacKay et al, 2007;Meyer & Hobson, 2004).…”