Investigating moral judgements in autistic children: integrating the observer’s and the speaker’s mind

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the moral judgements that autistic children make in everyday situations. Moral Transgressions (MT) and Faux Pas (FP) stories were compared, in which stories the agent’s morality and intention varied (MT: bad, FP: good), and were divided by the mediator (personal / material). Thirty autistic and 32 neurotypical children answered forced-choice questions. The two groups did not differ significantly when responding to either the MT or the FP questions. In between-group comparisons, the autistic group found difficulties in understanding the MT stories when the action directly affected another person (personal mediator). Comparisons between agent’s morality and intention variables revealed that autistic children judged the morality of the agent in FP stories as severe as in the MT task, even when the agent’s intention was understood. These subtle problems could shed some light on how autistic individuals would judge social situations, from the lack of a robust ToM to difficulties being socially flexible.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory of mind
• morality
• intention
• autism

Acknowledgements

This research was submitted as partial fulfillment for the degree of PhD by the first author. The research was supported by studentship from Generalitat Valenciana (Val i + D) and the grant UJI-A2016-12 supported by Universitat Jaume I de Castellón. We would like to thank all the children, families, teachers and professors who kindly participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 From here onwards the term autistic will be used, see Kenny et al. (2016). The acronym of Autism Spectrum Disorder – ASD will be employed only when groups are compared. See Vivanti (2019) for more information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Generalitat Valenciana: [Grant Number Vali+D]; Universitat Jaume I: [Grant Number UJI-A2016-12].