Autism does not limit strategic thinking in the “beauty contest” game

Abstract

A popular hypothesis in developmental psychology is that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a specific impairment or developmental delay in their ability to reason about other people’s mental processes, especially when this reasoning process is of a higher-order, recursive, or nested variety. One type of interpersonal interaction that involves this sort of complex reasoning about others’ minds is an economic game, and because economic games have been extensively modeled in behavioral economics, they provide a unique testbed for a quantitative and precise analysis of cognitive functioning in ASD. This study specifically asked whether ASD is associated with strategic depth in the economic game known as The Beauty Contest, in which all players submit a number from 0 to 100, and the winner is the player who submits the number closest to 2/3 of the mean of all numbers submitted. Unexpectedly, the distribution of responses among adult participants with ASD reflected a level of strategic reasoning at least as deep as that of their neurotypical peers, with the same proportion of participants with ASD being characterized as “higher order” strategic players. Thus, whatever mentalistic reasoning abilities are necessary for typical performance in the context of this economic game appear to be largely intact, and therefore unlikely to be fundamental to persistent social dysfunction in ASD.