Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published May 17, 2012 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Reduced social preferences in autism: evidence from charitable donations

Abstract

Background: People with autism have abnormal preferences, ranging from an apparent lack of preference for social stimuli to unusually strong preferences for restricted sets of highly idiosyncratic stimuli. Yet the profile of preferences across social and nonsocial domains has not been mapped out in detail, and the processes responsible remain poorly understood. Methods: To assess preferences across a range of stimuli, we measured real monetary donations to 50 charities spanning categories pertaining to people, mental health, animals, or the environment. We compared the donations made by 16 high-functioning adults with autism to those made by neurotypical controls matched on age, gender and education. We additionally collected ratings of how people evaluated the different charities. Results: Compared with controls, high-functioning adults with autism donated less overall and also showed a significantly disproportionate reduction in donations to people charities compared with donations to the other charities. Furthermore, whereas controls discriminated strongly between different people charities, choosing to donate a lot of money to some and very little to others, much less discrimination was seen in the autism group. Ratings that probed how participants constructed their preferences did not differ between groups, except for a difference in the perceived impact of pictures and text information about people charities. Strikingly, there were some charities related to mental health, and autism in particular, to which the autism group donated considerably more than did the controls. Conclusions: People with autism were found to have reduced preference and sensitivity towards charities benefiting other people. The findings provide evidence for a domain-specific impairment in social cognition in autism spectrum disorder, and in particular in linking otherwise intact social knowledge to the construction of value signals on which preferences regarding other people are based.

Additional Information

© 2012 Lin et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Received: 16 December 2011; Accepted: 7 March 2012; Published: 17 May 2012. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. We would like to thank Tim Armstrong and Catherine Holcomb for help with testing participants, and Lynn Paul and Dan Kennedy for help with providing diagnostic information on the groups of participants with ASD. This research was supported in part by the Amgen Scholars Program for Summer Research at Caltech, an IGERT training grant from NSF, and grants from the NIMH and the Simons Foundation.Authors' contributions: AL, KT, AR and RA designed research; AL and KT performed research; AL analyzed data; and AL and RA wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Attached Files

Published - 1866-1955-4-8.pdf

Supplemental Material - TableS1.doc

Files

1866-1955-4-8.pdf
Files (979.9 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:12605fa16b015eeb0894bebf84427a42
920.0 kB Preview Download
md5:47e7b4ee506602a56420b162b882d987
59.9 kB Download

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023