Mind perception and moral judgment in autism

作者：Hironori Akechi, Y. Kikuchi, Y. Tojo, Koichiro Hakarino, T. Hasegawa · 发表于：Autism Research · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1002/aur.1970 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：Medicine、Psychology

Social difficulties of autistic individuals have been suggested to be caused by mind blindness, the absence of a theory of mind. Numerous studies have investigated theory of mind in autism spectrum disorder or how autistic individuals represent the mental states of others. Here, we have examined, as an alternative, mind perception, namely how individuals perceive the minds of various animate and inanimate entities. Autistic and non‐autistic participants demonstrated evidence of a similar two‐dimensional mind perception; agency, capacity for doing (i.e., self‐control, memory, plan), and experience, capacity for feeling (i.e., fear, hunger, pain). Some targets (e.g., human infant and dog) were perceived to have low agency but high experience, while others (e.g., robot and God) were perceived to have the reverse pattern. Moreover, in both autistic and non‐autistic groups, the attribution of moral blame positively correlated with agency, whereas moral consideration positively correlated with experience. These results offer new evidence of social cognition, particularly conception of mind and morality, in autism. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1239–1244. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.