Autistische Menschen sind gegenüber Fremden und Menschen, die sie kaum kennen, prosozialer als ihre nicht-autistischen Altersgenossen. Diese Unterschiede wurden nicht durch wiederholte Reaktionen verursacht, die typisch für Autismus sind.
Autistic individuals are more prosocial towards strangers and people they barely know
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I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613251385029
From the linked article:
**Autistic individuals are more prosocial towards strangers and people they barely know**
A recent study found that autistic adults tend to be more prosocial towards socially distant individuals **compared to their non-autistic peers. These differences were not driven by repetitive responding that is typical of autism**. The paper was published in Autism.
Results showed that as the social distance increased, the generosity of non-autistic participants decreased faster than the generosity of autistic participants. In other words, autistic participants were more generous towards strangers and people they barely knew than non-autistic individuals.
Further analysis showed that these differences were not caused by repetitive behavior (i.e., autistic people’s preference to give the same answer every time). There were also no differences between the two groups in their attitudes toward money.
See, the problem I have with any study like this is autism isn’t a monolith, but so many people seem to portray it like it is. It’s a neurodevelopmental spectrum, some people with a spectrum disorder are going to be more social than neurotypical people and some will be less. The sample sizes of autistic and typical people is so small, just 38/39 people in each respective group, that I can’t help questioning the methodology that led to this result.
I think an hypothesis worth considering would be that strangers may be more tied to objectives they’re trying to accomplish, and/or may be mentally more along the lines of object rather than subject.
I wonder how much of this is due to abuse/rejection/neglect from family members. I’m not autistic, but as an abuse survivor I found that I was more likely to get positive outcomes from interactions with strangers and casual acquaintances than from family.
Yup. Most people are stuck in the exploit/compete mindset and don’t help others by default.