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We have a new paper! Led by my student Kerrianne Morrison (w/@kmdebrabander & @DanielFaso) we find that impressions of autistic adults made by neurotypicals (NT) are driven more by characteristics of the NT perceiver than by those of the ASD target. THREAD journals.sagepub.com/eprint/3B4RadK…
Our group (along with Ruth Grossman and @DanKennedyIU ) had previously found that NTs rate autistic adults less favorably than NT controls on many traits, and are less inclined to want to subsequently interact with them. 2/ nature.com/articles/srep4…
In a follow up paper, we found that impressions improve when NTs are informed that the person they are evaluating has a diagnosis of autism, presumably because they have an explanation for behaviors they perceive as atypical. 3/ journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
But we’ve always seen a lot of variability in how NTs evaluate autistic adults, and we wondered— is this variability driven more by differences among the NT perceivers or among the autistic targets? 4/
As reported in the new paper linked in the first tweet, it turns out that on most trait judgments— likability, attractiveness, trustworthiness, and intelligence— variability was driven more by differences among NT perceivers. 5/
Only on the rating of “awkward” was there a lot of consistency among NT raters. "Awkward" is a kind of an ambiguous judgement, and I've come to think of it (at least in this context) as meaning “deviating from some NT norm”, so consistency on this rating is not too surprising. 6/
Crucially, variability in NT interest in interacting with autistic adults— especially when diagnoses were provided— was driven in large part by individual differences among NT raters, particularly their attitudes about autism, and to a lesser degree, their autism knowledge. 7/
But how the autism diagnosis was labeled largely did not affect NT impression formation. For instance, referring to someone as “autistic” did not appreciably change NT impressions compared to when they were labeled as “having autism”. 8/
Replicating several previous reports, we generally find that lower stigma towards autism and more familiarity with autism among NTs was associated with more favorable impressions of autistic adults. 9/
But this was qualified by one incredibly important exception. For NTs with high stigma towards autism, informing them of the person’s autism diagnosis led them to form even *more* negative impressions about the autistic person compared to when it was withheld. 10/
So while “diagnostic disclosure” improved impressions of autistic adults for most NTs, it backfired when the NT held negative feelings about autism. This speaks to how social outcomes for autistic adults can be highly dependent upon relational context. 11/
In sum, NTs evaluate autistic adults differently when a diagnosis is provided. This suggests that aspects of autism remain “invisible” to NT perceivers, and that awareness of the diagnosis evokes beliefs and biases that affect impression formation. 12/
Our findings suggest that reducing NT autism-related stigma may be an important pathway for improving personal and professional opportunities for autistic adults and may be a more effective approach than a focusing on changing their behavioral and social differences. 13/13
One last thing-- Kerrianne Morrison made a great video abstract about our new paper.
