Implicit Social Biases in People With Autism

Abstract

Implicit social biases are ubiquitous and are known to influence social behavior. A core diagnostic criterion of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is abnormal social behavior. We investigated the extent to which individuals with ASD might show a specific attenuation of implicit social biases, using Implicit Association Tests (IATs) involving social (gender, race) and nonsocial (nature, shoes) categories. High-functioning adults with ASD showed intact but reduced IAT effects relative to healthy control participants. We observed no selective attenuation of implicit social (vs. nonsocial) biases in our ASD population. To extend these results, we supplemented our healthy control data with data collected from a large online sample from the general population and explored correlations between autistic traits and IAT effects. We observed no systematic relationship between autistic traits and implicit social biases in our online and control samples. Taken together, these results suggest that implicit social biases, as measured by the IAT, are largely intact in ASD.

Keywords: Implicit Association Test (IAT); autism spectrum disorder (ASD); implicit bias; open data; open materials; prejudice; stereotype.

Figure 1

a) Bar graphs of the average implicit association D scores for each of the five IATs (left panel) completed by the Online (MTurk; white), Controls (CTL; light grey), and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; dark grey) populations and the average D scores across the non-social and social IATs (right panel) for CTL and ASD populations. Note: different online populations completed the Evaluative (N=164) and Stereotype (N=178) tasks (see methods). b) Effect sizes (Cohen’s d) of the mean difference between CTL and ASD responses on the explicit measures collected. From left to right: Semantic associations (Flowers/Insects+Good/Bad, Dress Shoes/Sneakers+Sports/Business, Black/White+Good/Bad), Modern Racism Scale (MRS), Black/White+Mental/Physical Occupation (Race Occ.), Internal (IMS) and External (EMS) Motivation Scales, Modern Sexism Scale (MSS), Male/Female+Career/Family Occupation (Gender Occ.). All error bars represent 95% confidence intervals (estimated with a bootstrap procedure). ^aFlo/Ins Eval n=36 CTLs; ^bGender Stereo n=26 ASD.

Figure 2

Correlations (Pearson r’s) between IAT D effects and ADOS scores, for the ASD group. Each plot contains Pearson r and bootstrapped 95% CI. Top row: Raw Scores (A+B) = sum of raw scores on the Communication (A) and Social (B) subscales of the ADOS; Second row: Old Algorithm A+B = scores from Communication (A) + Social (B) scoring algorithm; Third row: New Algorithm (SA) = scores from Social Affect algorithm on revised ADOS; and Bottom row: New Algorithm Severity Score (SA) = calibrated Social Affect severity score (scores standardized from 1–10) for the ADOS. Degrees of freedom (in parentheses) for each correlation vary with availability of data points across tasks (no pilot participants took the Shoe IAT; only 2/8 pilot participants took the Race Stereotype IAT), and because 4 participants were missing raw ADOS scores (but had algorithm scores).

Figure 3

Top Row: Scatter plots of individual autism-spectrum quotient scores (AQ; y-axis) versus IAT D scores (x-axis) for each of the five IATs completed by the Online (MTurk; crosses) and Controls (CTL; circles) sample. Trend lines and Pearson correlations are for both populations combined. 95% confidence intervals were estimated with a bootstrap procedure. Bottom Row: Similar plots for individual Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire scores (BAPQ; y-axis) versus IAT D scores (x-axis) for each of the five IATs completed by the Online (MTurk; crosses) and Controls (CTL; circles) populations. Note: different online populations completed the Evaluative (N=164) and Stereotype (N=178) tasks (see Methods).