Thread by @Noahsasson

NEW PAPER led by @DesiRJones: non-autistic (NA) adults often hold negative implicit & explicit biases about autism that create barriers for autistic people and harm their personal & professional well-being. We wanted to see if we could reduce them. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13…

Our rationale: putting the onus exclusively on autistic people to “normalize”, mask their autism to fit in, and/or disclose their diagnosis hoping that it’ll be beneficial absolves NA people from working towards greater acceptance and accommodation.

Attitudes about autism are highly variable among NA people. Those w/ more autism familiarity & knowledge tend to hold less stigma and be more inclusive. This suggests that increasing them in NA adults might help promote greater autism acceptance.

Building on prior work by @kgillyn & others, we tested whether an autism acceptance training designed to increase autism familiarity and knowledge among NA adults results in lower explicit & implicit biases about autism and actual autistic people.

The training is a narrated presentation made by another group in collaboration w/ autistic adults. It covers diagnostic characteristics, sensory sensitivities, neurodiversity, autistic strengths & challenges, & includes 1st-person autistic narratives.

NA adults (n=238) either completed this training, a general mental health training that didn’t mention autism, or no training at all. They then completed a battery measuring their explicit and implicit biases about autism.

Explicit measures included their first impressions of actual autistic adults in video clips, a test of their autism knowledge, a measure of their autism stigma, and their believes about autistic functional abilities.

Implicit biases about autism were tested by an Implicit Association Test developed by @DesiRJones that examined whether NA adults unconsciously associate autism diagnostic labels with unpleasant personal attributes (and if training reduces them).

RESULTS: compared to the mental health and no training groups, NA adults in autism acceptance training had fewer misconceptions & lower stigma about autism, higher expectations of autistic abilities, & more positive 1st impressions of autistic adults.

The more positive 1st impressions included greater social interest in autistic adults even though trait ratings only improved for two items (intelligence & attractiveness). Training may have lessened the salience of traits for predicting social interest.

Also, improvements in 1st impressions occurred regardless of whether a diagnostic label was provided, suggesting that training effects were not just NA adults being primed by the presence of a diagnostic label to suppress their biases.

HOWEVER, the benefits of autism acceptance training did not extend to implicit biases. NA participants, regardless of training condition, continued to implicitly associate autism-related labels with unpleasant personal attributes.

Why might the training have affected explicit but not implicit biases? Explicit biases are consciously held, evolve quickly through learning or personal experiences, and are constrained by social desirability. This is not the case for implicit biases.

Implicit biases reflect underlying beliefs & automatic associations formed over time through reinforced information (including stereotypes), which tend to be more resistant to change. Short-term training programs are likely insufficient to alter them.

In sum, findings suggest that autism acceptance training offers promise for promoting more inclusive attitudes towards autistic people among NA adults, but these benefits may be limited to consciously controlled responses.

Additional research is needed to see if effects are sustained over time and extend to real-world environments, and whether reducing NA adults’ explicit biases w/o also reducing their implicit biases still confers benefit for autistic people.

Please DM/email myself or @DesiRJones if you’d like a copy of the full paper! Also big thanks to @kmdebrabander for her work on this project.