Individuals with autism are more likely than others to assign blame based on a situation’s negative outcome — whether or not malice was intended — a new study suggests.
The reason: people with autism tend to have poor use of a skill known as “theory of mind.” This ability, which is generally developed in children by age 5, helps establish moral judgment by allowing a person to understand that bad things can happen without bad intent.
In the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers presented a group of 26 adults — half with autism and half without — a series of hypothetical scenarios.
In one case, participants were told about two friends kayaking in the ocean. “Janet” tells her friend that it’s okay to swim after reading that the jellyfish nearby are harmless. But Janet’s friend ends up dying after being stung by a jellyfish while swimming.
Those with autism were more likely to fault Janet for the death even though she didn’t intend to harm her friend.
“There’s no normative truth as to whether accidents should be forgiven. The pattern with autistic patients is that they are at one end of the spectrum,” said Liane Young, a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored the study.
I am autistic and I wouldn’t believe Janet to begin with. I know that there really is no such thing as a “safe” jellyfish. They are all dangerous to some degree regardless of size.
I’m Autistic and I don’t believe Janet is completely at fault, but she is complicit. She didn’t intent her friend to die and probably feels horrible, but her act of carelessly imparting faulty information was negligent. If she told her friend that nothing bad would happen if she did not vaccinate her child, and the child died of measles, she would be complicit in that for imparting faulty information. Legally, no. But morally, she did play a role.
Is this study supposing that neurotypicals would not blame Janet AT ALL? That seems morally questionable to me.
I am neurotypical, and no, I would not necessarily blame Janet at all.
Most jellyfish are not harmful to humans – there are about 2000 species worldwide, and only about 100 are large enough / venomous enough to cause any harm to humans. Since there are native jellyfish species everywhere in all oceans, no one would play in the ocean at all, if all jellyfish were dangerous. How careful you need to be depends on where you are. In some areas you are quite likely to run into a dangerous jelly, in other areas it’s possible, and in still others, decades can go by without an encounter with a dangerous jelly.
Janet’s moral culpability depends on what she knows about the area. If she knows that dangerous jellyfish are known to occur in the area, and she chooses to take the risk of going in the water anyway, she has an obligation to let her friend know that there is some risk. If dangerous jellyfish are not usually found in the area, then she is not culpable.
Jellyfish have little power of locomotion, and can be blown out of their home ranges by storms into areas where few, if any, people would expect them to occur. If Janet has no reasonable way to know that a dangerous jellyfish might be in the area, how can she be responsible? No human can possibly know everything.
Were the adults matched for IQ, religious affiliation, family back ground etc. Even with careful matching such a small study is just a pilot study.
“Blame” is different than responsibility for. Because there is moral responsibility and causal responsibility.
When a person takes a pool cue, intentionally hits the white cue ball, and that ball hits another, the person is ultimately responsible. He (she) initiated the motion, with intent. However, the white ball caused to other ball to move. Obviously, not morally or intentionally; inanimate objects don’t have either of these. Still, regarding the physics of the matter, the action of the cue ball shares cause.
Janet played a role in her friend entering the water. However, it may have been simply causal. On the other hand, it included giving her friend honestly inaccurate, though well intended, information. For me, the question is: are we responsible for consequences if they result from information we impart that we don’t check out as being accurate or not?
Interesting that everyone is focusing on the jellyfish…..
My young son with Asperger’s struggles with this. I don’t believe the intent of this study is to define all persons with ASD as having struggles with Moral Reasoning. Rather, I believe the intent is to express the suggestive outcomes of the study.
It is unfortunate that the scientific community makes their papers and studies largely inaccessible to the public, wherein you must pay what is often an exorbitant fee to read the paper. It is hard to tell exactly what was tested and how just by reading this blurb. However, I take issue with the “moral reasoning is a struggle” conclusion (If that is the conclusion). Just because a control group of NTs largely decided one way, and the Autistics largely decided a different way, that doesn’t mean that the Autistics have faulty morals, or have difficulty making moral decisions. It just means that maybe we think differently. Morals are culturally and individually-based. But of course, without reading the actual paper, I can’t really comment on what conclusions were drawn and why.
Scientists need a much better PR team, and they need to make their research publicly available.
Also I think it matters exactly what Janet said to her friend. If she said “It’s ok, the jellyfish here are harmless,” then she is stating what she read as an absolute fact. Her friend had little room to doubt her, since she said it assuredly. If, however, she said “I read on wikipedia that the jellyfish here are harmless”, then she is not stating that the jellyfish ARE harmless, but that she READ that they are harmless. Her friend, then, can decide if the source (wikipedia) is reliable enough to trust, and if Janet is a close reader and has a good memory for facts.
I think it also depends on whether or not the killer jellyfish actually was rare in the area. If it was a freak occurance, but Janet’s information was mostly correct, then she is mostly off the hook. If in fact, her knowledge about the incidence of dangerous jellyfish in the area was truly flawed, and especially if she stated her knowledge as absolute fact, then she is still partially responsible.
@autisticandawesome. I really enjoyed reading your observations. I think one of the reasons that it’s hard to get access to scientific papers is that the journals charge very large fees both for publication (to the scientists) and for subscriptions (to the readers). This is starting to change with journals like the Public Library of Science who host many of their articles for free. Scientists often host individual pdfs of their articles as well. Sometimes you can find them by doing a google search for the article title.