Are autistic adults more vulnerable to criminal exploitation?

In a new study, Flinders university researchers have tested the commonly held belief that autistic adults are more prone than non-autistic adults to criminal exploitation due to difficulties in recognising criminal intent.

“It is not uncommon for defence lawyers, often supported by testimony from ‘expert’ witnesses, to argue that autistic adults have difficulty interpreting the intentions or reading the minds of others, rendering them vulnerable to being enticed into criminal activity,” says Professor Neil Brewer, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work.

“Such arguments reflect the widely-held perspective that difficulties reading others’ intentions, emotions and motivations are fundamental features of autism.

“However, this perspective may not hold up under scrutiny and we found that, in general, autistic adults are no more vulnerable to becoming ensnared in criminal acts than non-autistic adults.

“Moreover, the mindreading difficulties often considered inherently linked to autism are by no means ubiquitous in autistic adults.”

Published in the American Psychological Society’s journal, Law and Human Behavior, former PhD student, Zoe Michael, and her supervisor, Professor Neil Brewer, developed and used a novel and life-like paradigm — the Suspicious Activity Paradigm, or the SAP— to evaluate how well adults can recognise and respond to cues suggesting that social interactions might culminate in criminal behaviour.

The study involved 197 participants —102 autistic adults and 95 non-autistic adults – who were immersed as role players in scenarios that, as they unfolded, increasingly suggested criminal intent on the part of those with whom they were interacting.

They were then asked how they would react at various points as the scenarios unfolded to assess their capacity to recognise and respond to suspicious actions from others, thereby assessing their vulnerability to be unwittingly drawn into criminal activity.

“We found that, overall, both autistic and non-autistic adults responded in similar ways to suspicious behaviour across various scenarios,” says Professor Brewer.

“Importantly, autistic adults did not show lower rates of suspicion or adaptive responses when compared to their non-autistic counterparts as the scenarios unfolded. Nor did they take longer to recognise the potentially problematic nature of the interaction.”

Building on previous research, the study found that verbal intelligence and Theory of Mind (ToM) - a term used to describe the ability to take the perspective or read the mind of others - predicted someone’s ability to recognise and respond to suspicious activity.

“Our findings indicate that the ability to understand others' perspectives and intentions – and not the presence of an autism diagnosis – was a critical factor influencing their vulnerability to crime,” he says.

In other words, while autistic individuals who had difficulty discerning others’ intentions were vulnerable, the same was true of their non-autistic peers.

It is important to note, however, that there was a relatively small proportion of autistic individuals whose performance on the mindreading measure was below that of any of the non-autistic sample, a finding consistently replicated by the Flinders research team who developed the measure.

This indicates that there will be some autistic individuals who will likely be particularly vulnerable because of mindreading difficulties – but such difficulties cannot be assumed.

“Thus, rather than defence lawyers and clinicians assuming, and arguing, that a diagnosis of autism automatically signals a particular vulnerability to being lured into crime, it is important to formally assess and demonstrate that a criminal suspect or defendant has significant mindreading difficulties that likely have rendered them vulnerable,” he adds.

The article, ‘Detecting Criminal Intent in Social Interactions: The Influence of Autism and Theory of Mind’ by Zoe Michael and Neil Brewer is published in Law and Human Behavior. DOI:10.1037/lhb0000575

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Program (Grant DP 190100162 awarded to Neil Brewer and Robyn Young) and a Flinders University Research Training Scholarship awarded to Zoe Michael.