Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

Abstract

This study investigated hypothetical moral choices in adults with high-functioning autism and the role of empathy and alexithymia in such choices. We used a highly emotionally salient moral dilemma task to investigate autistics’ hypothetical moral evaluations about personally carrying out harmful utilitarian behaviours aimed at maximizing welfare. Results showed that they exhibited a normal pattern of moral judgments despite the deficits in social cognition and emotional processing. Further analyses revealed that this was due to mutually conflicting biases associated with autistic and alexithymic traits after accounting for shared variance: (a) autistic traits were associated with reduced utilitarian bias due to elevated personal distress of demanding social situations, while (b) alexithymic traits were associated with increased utilitarian bias on account of reduced empathic concern for the victim. Additionally, autistics relied on their non-verbal reasoning skills to rigidly abide by harm-norms. Thus, utilitarian moral judgments in autism were spared due to opposite influences of autistic and alexithymic traits and compensatory intellectual strategies. These findings demonstrate the importance of empathy and alexithymia in autistic moral cognition and have methodological implications for studying moral judgments in several other clinical populations.

Decision making processes based on social conventional rules in early adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders

“…Empathy or other emotional difficulties are associated with ASD, but recent work has suggested that many of these effects are due to comorbid alexithymia4546. As a next step, the relationship between the alexithymia and moral judgement should be further explored1936. Second, the diagnoses were not obtained using the Autism Diagnostic Interview – Revised (ADI-R)47 or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS)48.…”

“…It is widely reported that individuals with ASD who have comorbid alexithymia are atypical in terms of recognizing their own emotions1314 and in empathizing with others151617. Empathy is a social emotion that plays a crucial role in such moral evaluations, because empathy allows moral judges to understand suffering and to use the resulting “gut-feelings” to either approve or disapprove of moral actions1819.…”

“…Typically developing individuals in early adolescence make trait inferences as well as behaviour- and intention-based inferences26. Individuals with ASD evidence deficits in more complex intention-based moral judgement tasks that require integration of information about agent mental states with information about the outcomes of behaviours19. Recent studies using IAT (implicit association test) tasks have shown that implicit social biases are largely intact in ASD23, suggesting that individuals with ASD do have the ability to make trait inferences.…”

Variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) is associated with differences in moral judgment

“…While historically research suggests that ASD is associated with utilitarian moral judgment (Gleichgerrcht et al , 2013), a more recent study finds that the high levels of utilitarian responding, often observed in individuals on the autism spectrum, may in fact be due to the high co-occurrence of alexithymea (the inability to recognize and identify emotions) and autism. In fact, when measuring alexithymea and autistic traits separately in individuals with ASD, autistic traits are significantly negatively associated with utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas (Patil et al , 2016). …”

The behavioral and neural basis of empathic blame

“…Past research shows that the activation of this network plays a role in promoting prosocial action aimed at alleviating victim suffering [36][37][38][39][40] . Yet, at the neural level, it has not previously been associated with the moral condemnation of those who cause others to suffer 41 .…”