Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, United States of America.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2023 May;235:103895. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.103895. Epub 2023 Mar 21.
Despite evidence often showing differences between groups with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and neurotypical controls in moral judgment, the precise nature of these differences has been difficult to establish. At least two reasons for this are (1) that ASD (and its associated characteristics) is difficult to define and (2) that morality, and the inclinations that undergird it, are hard to measure empirically. These challenges have made conclusive associations between ASD and particular patterns of moral judgment hard to come by. Thus, in the current study, participants levels of a traits associated with ASD were assessed by their responses to a questionnaire (i.e., the Iowa Screener) before they made moral judgments across a set of 20 moral dilemmas that independently assess utilitarian and deontological processing. Interestingly, results indicated that increased levels of autistic traits were associated with fewer moral judgments corresponding to either moral theory; that is, higher levels of autistic traits were associated with atypical patterns of moral judgment. In addition, and consistent with some prior methods (e.g., Gaeth et al., 2016), participant scores on the Iowa Screener, as well as their self-identification, were used to categorize participants between two groups (i.e., ASD and Typical) for exploratory purposes. Taken together, this research better informs the relationship between ASD and its associated traits with moral judgment and can inform certain discrepant findings in the field. Implications and ideas for future research are discussed, such as whether traits associated with ASD might relate to alternative moral inclinations, beyond deontology and utilitarianism.
尽管有证据表明自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 患者和神经典型对照组在道德判断方面存在差异，但这些差异的具体性质很难确定。至少有两个原因：(1) ASD（及其相关特征）难以定义，(2) 道德及其基础倾向难以通过经验进行测量。这些挑战使得 ASD 与特定的道德判断模式之间的明确关联难以建立。因此，在当前的研究中，参与者通过回答问卷（即爱荷华筛查器）来评估与 ASD 相关的特质水平，然后对 20 个道德困境进行道德判断，这些困境独立评估功利主义和义务论处理。有趣的是，结果表明，自闭症特质水平越高，与任何一种道德理论对应的道德判断就越少；也就是说，自闭症特质水平越高，与非典型的道德判断模式相关。此外，与一些先前的方法（例如 Gaeth 等人，2016）一致，参与者在爱荷华筛查器上的得分以及他们的自我认同被用于将参与者分为两组（即 ASD 和典型）进行探索性目的。总的来说，这项研究更好地说明了 ASD 及其相关特征与道德判断之间的关系，并可以为该领域的某些不一致发现提供信息。讨论了未来研究的意义和想法，例如，与 ASD 相关的特质是否可能与除了义务论和功利主义之外的替代道德倾向有关。
