Thread by @Noahsasson

Very proud of @kmdebrabander for her #INSAR2021 poster “Autistic Adults Accurately Detect Social Disinterest in their Conversation Partners when Non-Autistic Adults Do Not”. A🧵about our findings, which pretty clearly don’t align with a social cognitive deficit model of autism!

Data in this study are drawn from an earlier project by Kerrianne Morrison who found (among other things) that non-autistic adults-- but not autistic ones-- express low social interest for future interaction with autistic people they just met.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

In the study detailed in Kilee's poster, we asked participants after their conversations to predict how their partner would evaluate their character traits and their interest in interacting with them again in the future.

It turns out, people are really bad at this! All participants, not just autistic ones, had difficulty predicting how others viewed them.

However, only autistic adults accurately predicted when their partners wanted to interact with them again and when they didn’t.

This finding replicates prior ones by @ellveeyou and @danielmessinger, who found that autistic adolescents demonstrate better metaperception about being liked than non-autistic ones following a real-world interaction.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Non-autistic adults in our study overestimated the social interest of their partners, predicting that their partners would report greater social interest in them than they actually did. This “self-enhancement” bias is commonly found in other studies and may be self-protecting.

So... if you wanted to shoehorn a deficit-model interpretation onto this finding, you might conclude that autistic adults have a “self-enhancement”’ deficit. Perhaps poor prior social experiences and internalized beliefs lead them to (accurately) expect low social interest.

But such an interpretation would reframe more accurate performance among autistic adults as a failure. A more impartial reading would be that autistic adults demonstrated intact social cognition in this context and it was non-autistic people who showed a social cognitive deficit.

In a way, these findings are a litmus test of sorts for a type of autism research. How you interpret a difference in autism can depend on the priors, expectations, and beliefs you bring into the study. We as autism researchers should question these whenever we can. /end