Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511;
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Sep 24;116(39):19245-19247. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1911460116. Epub 2019 Sep 9.
Social-cognitive skills can take different forms, from accurately predicting individuals' intentions, emotions, and thoughts (person perception or folk psychology) to accurately predicting social phenomena more generally. Past research has linked autism spectrum (AS) traits to person perception deficits in the general population. We tested whether AS traits also predict poor accuracy in terms of predicting generalized social phenomena, assessed via participants' accuracy at predicting social psychological phenomena (e.g., social loafing, social projection, group think). We found the opposite. In a sample of ∼6,500 participants in 104 countries, AS traits predicted slightly higher social psychological skill. A second study with 400 participants suggested that heightened systemizing underlies this relationship. Our results indicate that AS traits relate positively to a form of social cognitive skill-predicting social psychological phenomena-and highlight the importance of distinguishing between divergent types of social cognition.
社会认知技能可以采取不同的形式，从准确预测个人的意图、情绪和想法（人物感知或民间心理学）到更准确地预测更普遍的社会现象。过去的研究将自闭症谱系（AS）特征与一般人群中的人物感知缺陷联系起来。我们测试了 AS 特征是否也预示着预测广义社会现象的准确性较差，这是通过参与者对社会心理现象（例如，社会闲散、社会投射、群体思维）的预测准确性来评估的。我们发现结果相反。在来自 104 个国家的约 6500 名参与者的样本中，AS 特征预示着社会心理技能略有提高。第二项涉及 400 名参与者的研究表明，系统化思维增强了这种关系。我们的研究结果表明，AS 特征与预测社会心理现象的一种社会认知技能呈正相关，并强调了区分不同类型的社会认知的重要性。
