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.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by differences in social communication, sensory processing, and patterns of behavior that may include strong interests and a preference for routine. Autistic individuals tend to experience the world with heightened or reduced sensitivity to sensory input, which can influence how they interact with their environment.

The social behaviors of many autistic individuals differ from typical norms, but these differences often reflect communication styles rather than a lack of social motivation. Research shows that autistic individuals can display strong prosocial behaviors, such as helping, sharing, and comforting, especially when situations are clear and expectations are explicit.

Compared to non-autistic individuals, autistic people tend to rely more on rules, fairness principles, or empathy based on understanding others’ situations rather than on reading subtle emotional cues. When tasks are structured and communication is direct, autistic individuals often show prosocial responses equal to or greater than their non-autistic peers.

Study author Paul AG Forbes and his colleagues note that previous studies suggest that autistic individuals show a flatter decline in generosity towards socially distant others compared with non-autistic individuals. In other words, non-autistic individuals tend to be the most generous with the people closest to them, but their generosity decreases relatively quickly when more distant individuals (those they do not know well or at all) are considered. This decline in generosity is present in autistic individuals as well, but it is much slower and less steep.

The authors of this study wanted to know whether this less pronounced decline in generosity with social distance is a consequence of autistic individuals’ preference for repetitive responding (whereby they might respond in the same way regardless of how close the person is to them) or is caused by genuinely higher prosociality.

Study participants were 37 autistic and 38 non-autistic adults. They were recruited via a local database of participants at University College London. 36 of them were women. The average age of autistic individuals was 34, and it was 39 for the non-autistic group.

Participants first completed the six primary items of the Social Value Orientation (SVO) questionnaire. In these six items, they needed to allocate money to themselves and another person. The items offered various combinations of amounts allocated to the participant and to another individual.

In each item, combinations of amounts given to oneself and to the other are presented differently on a slider; therefore, choosing the same relative position on the slider in different items results in different distributions of money.

Study participants completed this six times with instructions each time to imagine an individual with a specific social distance from them, ranging from people very close to them, to people they barely know, to people who are complete strangers.

For very close others, participants were told not to think of anyone with whom they share a household or a bank account (as giving money to those people might be like giving money to oneself), nor anyone they have negative feelings toward.

To ensure the results reflected genuine behavior, the decisions were incentivized: participants were informed that a computer would randomly select choices to be paid out in real money. At the end of the study procedure, participants completed an assessment of attitudes towards money.

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.

“Autistic individuals showed enhanced prosocial behavior, replicating previous work. Compared with non-autistic participants, autistic adults were more generous towards people they felt less close to. We extend previous work by showing that these effects were not due to more repetitive responding in autism nor due to differences in attitudes towards money. Our findings support an emerging view that while autistic people often face challenges navigating their social worlds, autism is associated with more prosocial behavior,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of autism. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a relatively small group of participants.

The paper, “Increased prosocial value orientation in autistic adults,” was authored by Paul AG Forbes, Gillian Hughes, Leonhard Schilbach, Sarah White, and Tobias Kalenscher.