Abstract
Detection of deception is of fundamental importance for everyday social life and might require “mindreading” (the ability to represent others’ mental states). People with diminished mindreading, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), might be at risk of manipulation because of lie detection difficulties. In Experiment 1, performance among 216 neurotypical adults on a realistic lie detection paradigm was significantly negatively associated with number of ASD traits, but not with mindreading ability. Bayesian analyses complemented null hypothesis significance testing and suggested the data supported the alternative hypothesis in this key respect. Cross validation of results was achieved by randomly splitting the full sample into two subsamples of 108 and rerunning analyses. The association between lie detection and ASD traits held in both subsamples, showing the reliability of findings. In Experiment 2, lie detection was significantly impaired in 27 adults with a diagnosis of ASD relative to 27 matched comparison participants. Results suggest that people with ASD (or ASD traits) may be particularly vulnerable to manipulation and may benefit from lie detection training. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1129–1137. © 2018 The Authors Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Lay SummaryDetection of deception is of fundamental importance for everyday social life. People with diminished understanding of other minds, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), might be at risk of manipulation because of lie detection difficulties. We found that lie detection ability was related to how many ASD traits neurotypical people manifested and also was significantly diminished among adults with a full diagnosis of ASD.
Highlights
The ability to detect when one is being deceived by others is of fundamental importance for everyday social life and difficulties detecting deception increase one’s risk of being manipulated, with potentially serious consequences
If there is a link between deception detection ability and mindreading ability, individuals with diminished mindreading ability should show impoverished lie detection skill
corrected hit rate (CHR) in the nontransparent condition was almost identical among autism spectrum disorder (ASD) participants (M 5 2.05, SD 5 .27) and comparison participants (M 5 2.08, SD 5 .24), t 5 0.42, P 5 .67, d 5 0.11, BF10 5 0.30, and nonsignificantly below chance in both groups, ts > 6.65, all ps < .001, all BF10s < 0.33
Summary
The ability to detect when one is being deceived by others is of fundamental importance for everyday social life and difficulties detecting deception increase one’s risk of being manipulated, with potentially serious consequences. If there is a link between deception detection ability and mindreading ability, individuals with diminished mindreading ability should show impoverished lie detection skill This is especially pertinent when considering the case of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). People with ASD are thought to be vulnerable to social manipulation, in part because of a difficulty in understanding lies Such a hypothesized difficulty with lie detection ability has never been investigated directly. Using cartoon-type paradigms, studies have shown that individuals with ASD have difficulties understanding “double bluff,” in distinguishing lies from sarcasm/irony [Happe, 1994]. It is unclear how these indirect findings map on to true lie detection ability in realistic (nonhypothetical) situations. We further predicted that this diminution would be most pronounced when judging transparent individuals, given that even neurotypical comparison participants might show low accuracy when judging nontransparent individuals
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