New Research Found Autistic Adults Are Fairer to Strangers

If you’re the parent of an autistic girl, you’ve probably sat in a meeting where her social differences were read out like a charge sheet. Difficulty with reciprocity. Deficits in social communication. Maybe someone even used the word empathy, as in “lacks”. You went home, looked at your child, who cries at injustice and cannot walk past unfairness without naming it, and wondered whether these people had met her at all.

A new study suggests your instincts were right.

A team of researchers from UCL and institutions in Germany gave 37 autistic adults and 38 non-autistic adults a simple task with real money at stake: split a sum between yourself and another person.

The twist was who that other person was. Participants made the choice six times over, for people at different social distances: first the person they felt emotionally closest to, then a good friend, all the way out to an acquaintance and finally a complete stranger. Because real money was paid out, this measured what people actually do, not what they say they’d do.

When the other person was someone close, there was no difference at all. Autistic and non-autistic adults were equally generous to the people they love. So much for the empathy deficit.

The difference appeared as the other person got more distant. Non-autistic adults’ generosity dropped away steeply the less they knew someone. Autistic adults’ generosity held. At the acquaintance level, the gap between the groups was large and statistically robust. In plain English: non-autistic people became noticeably more self-interested once the other person was a near-stranger. Autistic people didn’t.

The researchers checked the obvious alternative explanations. It wasn’t that autistic participants were answering on autopilot, and it wasn’t that they cared less about money. Both were ruled out. What was left was the finding itself: autistic adults applied fairness consistently, whether or not the person on the other end was someone who’d ever know about it.

The researchers’ interpretation is worth sitting with. They suggest autistic people may hold fairness as a moral principle and apply it consistently, rather than adjusting it depending on who benefits.

For decades, the research literature has framed autistic social difference as deficit: impaired empathy, impaired reciprocity, impaired theory of mind. This study joins a growing body of work telling a different story, one that many autistic people and their families have been telling all along. The difference was never an absence of care. In this study, the measurable difference was that autistic adults didn’t become more selfish when the social maths said they could.

That fierce sense of justice you might see in your daughter, the one that gets written up as rigidity or “black and white thinking”, is the same trait this study measured as heightened generosity towards strangers. The trait didn’t change. The framing did.

This is just one study of 75 adults in the UK, all with lower support needs and verbal speech, and the authors say so themselves. One earlier study of autistic adolescents found a different pattern, which the authors address, so this is an evolving picture rather than a settled one. Findings about groups also never predict an individual: autistic people are as varied as anyone else.

But the direction of travel matters. When studies stop measuring autistic people against a neurotypical template and start measuring what they actually do, the “deficits” keep turning out to be more complicated, and sometimes they turn out to be strengths.

If you’re a parent: next time a professional describes your daughter’s social differences purely as deficits, you have a peer-reviewed study in the journal Autism to point to. Fairness that doesn’t fade with distance is not a disorder.

If you’re a SENCO, EP or clinician: ask yourself how many of the girls on your caseload have a “rigid sense of justice” noted somewhere in their paperwork, and whether anyone has ever framed that to the family as the strength this research suggests it is.

And if you’re autistic and reading this: you probably didn’t need a study to tell you. But it’s rather nice to have one.

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