Autistic people differ from non-autistic people subjectively, but not objectively in their reasoning.

Abstract

Lay abstract: Autistic people often experience challenges in social contexts, and when decisions need to be made quickly. There is evidence showing that autistic people have a tendency for greater deliberation and lower intuition, compared to non-autistic people. This has led to the researchers' proposal that autism is associated with an enhanced level of rationality. However, these theories have been mostly explored through the lens of either only non-social domain or only social domain. To address this gap, we recruited autistic adults and carefully matched them with non-autistic adults for comparison. We used a task representing both social and non-social interactions in a comparison structure and asked participants' moral judgements on scenarios' main characters. This was complemented by subjective and objective measures of reasoning. Our findings did not reveal meaningful differences between groups in terms of deliberation. However, we did observe that autistic participants self-reported lower levels of intuition, compared to non-autistic participants. Autistic people consistently rate themselves as less intuitive than their counterparts. Nevertheless, objective evidence supporting this across tasks and studies is inconsistent.