The implicit perception of harm following moral violations in autism

Abstract

Previous studies showed that when reading a scenario depicting a harmless moral violation in the domain of purity, people nevertheless implicitly infer that harm was involved. In this study, we assessed whether this “implicit completion” process found in the perception of immoral actions is also present in people with autism spectrum disorder. In two experiments, we found an implicit activation of harm representations in response to all kinds of moral violations in neurotypical adults as well as in adults with autism. These results suggested that the perception of moral violations is relatively preserved in people with autism.

Keywords:

• Moral violations
• autistic spectrum disorder
• affect misattribution
• harm perception
• social cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.