Insensitivity to social reputation in autism

Abstract

People act more prosocially when they know they are watched by others, an everyday observation borne out by studies from behavioral economics, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. This effect is thought to be mediated by the incentive to improve one's social reputation, a specific and possibly uniquely human motivation that depends on our ability to represent what other people think of us. Here we tested the hypothesis that social reputation effects are selectively impaired in autism, a developmental disorder characterized in part by impairments in reciprocal social interactions but whose underlying cognitive causes remain elusive. When asked to make real charitable donations in the presence or absence of an observer, matched healthy controls donated significantly more in the observer's presence than absence, replicating prior work. By contrast, people with high-functioning autism were not influenced by the presence of an observer at all in this task. However, both groups performed significantly better on a continuous performance task in the presence of an observer, suggesting intact general social facilitation in autism. The results argue that people with autism lack the ability to take into consideration what others think of them and provide further support for specialized neural systems mediating the effects of social reputation.

Fig. 1.

Experimental tasks. (A) Design of Donation task. In each cell the number at top left indicates the amount of money subjects lose, and the number at bottom right indicates the amount of money the charity gains. Each design cell was implemented twice in each Presence and Absence session (i.e., 50 trials). (B) Example of a trial in the Donation task. A small random jitter was added to each monetary amount. After subjects decided whether to accept or reject the presented monetary transfer, their choices were highlighted by a red circle for 1.5 s. (C) Sequence of trials in the CPT. In each trial, a letter of the alphabet was presented for 0.2 s, and subjects were asked to press a button only when a letter “X” was presented. Subjects performed the task continuously for approximately 13 min.

Fig. 2.

Proportions of accepted donations in the Absence condition in each design cell depicted in Fig. 1A. White indicates a high proportion of accepted donations, whereas black indicates a low proportion.

Fig. 3.

Results for Donation and CPT tasks. Blue indicates control subjects, and red indicates ASD subjects. Dark blue/red indicates the Presence condition, and light blue/red indicates the Absence condition. (A) Mean number of accepted donations in each Presence and Absence condition for both groups. (B) Correlations between the number of accepted donations in the Absence condition and the susceptibility to the observer effect (difference in accepted donations between Presence vs. Absence condition). Higher value in the y axis indicates more donations in the Presence condition relative to the Absence condition. Values of the x axis are jittered to reduce the overlap of points. (C) Mean RTs in the Donation task. (D) Average d′ in CPT. Higher d′ means higher sensitivity to target stimuli. For A, C, and D, P values were based on one-tailed paired t tests. Error bars indicate SEM. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001.