Social autism as a degenerative psychosocial syndrome in changing societies

Abstract

We have developed three behavioral scenarios activated in natural urban interaction (total participants: 2240 subjects): the explicit ones (“the lucky driver” – S3, “passerby hot hand” – S2) or implicit one (“the communitarian spit” – S1). We have observed the incidence of pro-social behavior as a very low rate of helping ‘others’: in the explicit scenarios, the specific score was 63.4% in S2 (in a context characterized by very high social desirability) and 10.41% in S3 (context with low social desirability). All of these findings have articulated the social autism concept for better describing a degenerative psycho-social syndrome, expressed by public disengagement and closeness.