Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Corso Bettini 31, 38068, Rovereto, TN, Italy.
Azienda Provinciale per i Servizi Sanitari di Trento, Trento, Italy.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2019 Dec;49(12):5078-5085. doi: 10.1007/s10803-019-04212-9.
Past research suggested that, due to difficulties in mentalistic reasoning, individuals with autism tend to base their moral judgments on the outcome of agents' actions rather than on agents' intentions. In a novel task, aimed at reducing the processing demands required to represent intentions and generate a judgment, autistic children were presented with agents that accidentally harmed or attempted but failed to harm others and were asked to judge those agents. Most of the times, children blamed the character who attempted to harm and exculpated the accidental wrongdoer, suggesting that they generated intent-based moral judgments. These findings suggest that processing limitations rather than lack of conceptual competence explain the poor performance reported in previous research on moral judgment in autism.
过去的研究表明，由于在心理推理方面存在困难，自闭症患者往往更倾向于根据行为者的行为后果而非意图来进行道德判断。在一项旨在降低意图表达和判断生成所需加工难度的新任务中，研究者向自闭症儿童呈现了意外伤害他人和意图伤害但未能成功的行为者，并要求他们对这些行为者进行判断。多数情况下，儿童会责备试图伤害他人的角色，并原谅意外犯错者，这表明他们做出了基于意图的道德判断。这些发现表明，是加工限制而不是概念能力的缺乏解释了先前自闭症患者道德判断研究中报告的较差表现。
