Are autistic individuals really as socially motivated as the rest of us?

 Autistic individuals are just as socially motivated as the rest of us. For FC believers, this has to be true. Indeed, it’s one of the foundations of the FC belief system: autism must be a sensory-motor/motor-planning/praxis disorder and not the socio-cognitive disorder that decades of clinical observation, research, and standardized diagnostic criteria have firmly established autism—or,  more precisely, autism spectrum disorder—to be.

Further committing FCers to social motivation being intact in autism is the content of many FC-generated messages. Let’s look, for example, at the testimonials cited in “Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism” (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2018—see our critique here). Five of these testimonials are attributed to FCed individuals—Jamie Burke, Alberto Frugone, Naoki Higashida, Ido Kedar, and Amy Sequenzia—and allude to:

• “my desire for friends” (Jamie Burke)

• “the social person that inside me I wanted to be” (Alberto Frugone)

• “the truth” that “we'd love to be with other people” (Naoki Higashida)

• “a big misconception” of liking objects more than people (Ido Kedar)

• the appearance of lack of social interest as “only a self-preservation mask.” (Amy Sequenzia)

Most articles offering support for a redefinition of autism avoid Jaswal and Akhtar’s problematic reliance on anecdotes and even more problematic reliance on testimony generated by FC. There is, for example, the Gernsbacher oeuvre that we critiqued over the course of last year, beginning with this post. And there’s a recent article about motor difficulties in autism that we critiqued here. The problems with these articles are considerably more subtle than those on display in Jaswal and Akhtar (2018).

But a recent article on social motivation is much more problematic. This article, Mournet et al. (2023), finds that “Autistic participants had significantly greater motivation/desire to connect with others compared to non-autistic participants.”

Greater social motivation in autism? How did the researchers reach this conclusion?

Inklings of the answer are seen in the participants. No, they were not FCed, but Mournet et al. recruited them online and included as eligibility requirements being “able to read and understand English” and being “a legally independent adult.” In other words, all but the highest functioning fraction of the autism spectrum were excluded. Second, as Mournet et al. acknowledge, the participants were disproportionately female (the autism spectrum is about four-fifths male). Third, the autistic half of the sample was determined based on self-reports of autism. Such self-reports (though Mournet et al. don’t mention this) are highly unreliable: they potentially include significant numbers of individuals who have diagnosed themselves as autistic, but who don’t actually meet the diagnostic criteria. The phenomenon of autism fakery, in fact, dates back decades.

Then there’s the issue of “social motivation.” Mournet et al. attempted to assess this through “a battery of self-report measures,” culminating in two scales: a Connection with Others Scale (CWOS) scale and slightly modified Connecting with Others Scale, Autistic Version (CWOS-AV). These scales, which Mournet et al. devised based on feedback from their participants, had subjects rate themselves from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” on eight items. The eight items on the CWOS-AV (very similar to those on the CWOS) are:

1. I am part of a group of friends

2. I value talking with other people

3. I want to interact with people who are similar to me

4. I want to interact with people who have similar interests as me

5. I want to get to know other people

6. I enjoy interacting with people who are different than me

7. I spend time with other people

8. I value interacting with people who are different than me

The most obvious problem here is the inherent unreliability of self-rating scales, particularly when they probe subjective factors like enjoyment.

But there’s a second problem: the problem of construct validity, or of reducing social motivation to this handful of specific items. For all the adjustments Mournet et al. made based on participant feedback, it remains unclear to what degree these eight items collectively capture social motivation, which the researchers never actually define.

One way to characterize social motivation is in relative terms: how strong someone’s social motivation is compared to their other motivations. Indeed, empirical studies of autism are often about relatives rather than absolutes: e.g., preferences for non-social over social stimuli, or (contrary to Ido Kedar’s FCed message) for objects over people.

But none of the CWOS items probe preferences, or comparative levels of motivation, as in “I enjoy spending time with people more than I enjoy pursuing my solo hobbies.” A person might enjoy interacting and spending time with people and “strongly agree” that this accurately characterizes them, while still strongly preferring to tinker with electric outlets or read books about Ancient Rome. Indeed, as I found in a review of memoirs by high-functioning autistic individuals—the basis for Chapter 8 of my book Students with Autism—these people often crave social connection but are, first and foremost, obsessed with non-social pursuits.

Mournet et al. also fail in another sort of comparison: a comparison of their findings with those of contradictory studies. They do state that “it is necessary to acknowledge the social motivation theory of autism”: the notion that autism involves diminished, rather than higher-than-average, social motivation. But they mention only two of the many papers that provide evidence for diminished social interest (namely, Chevallier et al., 2012 and Chevallier et al., 2013). And instead of engaging with the content of these papers, they change the subject to another paper: a more favorable one that’s also based on internet survey data (Maitland et al., 2021), and which they mischaracterize as claiming that autistic individuals “report feelings of social identification with at least one group.”

What Maitland et al. actually report is this:

In total, 184 autistic adults completed an online survey with questionnaires about their demographics, social groups and mental health. The results found that autistic adults reported on their social groups similarly to non-autistic people.  There was a variety in the types and numbers of groups that autistic adults identified with. Some participants reported having no groups that they identified with, whereas others reported up to four groups. [Boldface added]

Returning to Mournet et al., they do acknowledge that their recruitment process “limits generalization to the broader population of autistic adults.” But this does not inspire them to temper their conclusion:

Autistic participants had significantly greater scores on both versions of the CWOS, demonstrating higher levels of motivation, desire, enjoyment, and value associated with connecting with others. This provides clear evidence in contradiction of the social motivation theory of autism” and that “the social motivation theory of autism cannot be generalized to all autistic people, or even most autistic people, as is also emphasized by Jaswal and Akhtar (2018).

A more appropriate conclusion would have been this:

Individuals with autism who are high functioning enough to live independently and socially motivated enough to respond to internet-based recruitment efforts and participate in surveys of their social interests are… socially motivated. In particular, they enjoy interacting with people.

Not a big surprise.

And nowhere near the kind of evidence that warrants an FC-friendly redefinition of autism.

REFERENCES

Chevallier, C., Grèzes, J., Molesworth, C., Berthoz, S., & Happé, F. (2012). Brief report: Selective social anhedonia in high functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(7), 1504–1509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-011-1364-0

Chevallier, C., Kohls, G., Troiani, V., Brodkin, E. S., & Schultz, R. T. (2012). The social motivation theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(4), 231–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.02.007

Maitland, C. A., Rhodes, S., O'Hare, A., & Stewart, M. E. (2021). Social identities and mental well-being in autistic adults. Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 25(6), 1771–1783. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613211004328:

Mournet, A., Bal, V., Selby, E. A., & Kleiman, E. (2023, February 27). Assessment of multiple facets of social connection among autistic and non-autistic adults: Development of the Connections With Others Scales. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/d6t5k

Jaswal, V. K., & Akhtar, N. (2018). Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 42, e82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18001826