Autistic adults tend to be more generous towards strangers, study finds
New research has found autistic adults are more generous to strangers than non-autistic individuals. This increased generosity, evident in a money division task, suggests autism may involve a more consistent application of fairness norms.
A study in Germany found that autistic adults tend to be more generous towards strangers compared to people without this disorder. In a task where they had to divide money between individuals, they were more prone to split the money equally regardless of how close they felt to the person they were sharing the money with.
This behavior is known as social discounting. Although personality traits such as altruism and empathy can lead to greater generosity towards strangers, social discounting remains prevalent even among highly empathetic and altruistic individuals.
Individuals with autism tended to be more generous towards people they did not see as close to them.
Individuals without autism were also more affected by framing. In a situation where the decision could result in a gain for the other person, individuals without autism were much more likely to not give the other anything (i.e., were less inclined to forgo money) compared to autistic individuals. These individuals were more likely to forgo money if not doing that would create a loss for the other person. This difference in forgone money in the two situations was present in autistic participants as well, but it was very slight.
“We show that compared to a neurotypical group, autistic adults were more generous to other people, which was driven by a greater generosity to more socially distant others. We propose that this increased generosity to strangers is driven by autistic adults implementing fairness norms more consistently and differences in sensitivity to social information,” the study authors concluded.
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