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. 2019 Sep 24;116(39):19245-19247.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1911460116. Epub 2019 Sep 9.

Autism spectrum traits predict higher social psychological skill

Anton Gollwitzer  1 , Cameron Martel  2 , James C McPartland  3 , John A Bargh  2
Affiliations

Autism spectrum traits predict higher social psychological skill

Anton Gollwitzer et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: autism; autism traits; person perception; social cognition; social psychological skill.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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