Autistic and non-autistic prosocial decision-making: The impact of recipient neurotype

A body of research suggests cross-neurotype interpersonal interactions may be more challenging, and non-autistic individuals show less interest in interacting with their autistic peers. However, it is not clear whether such cross-neurotype differences extend to prosocial decision-making behaviour – something that is vital for forming and maintaining social bonds. Using a physical-effort-based decision-making paradigm, in combination with computational modelling, we examined 30 autistic and 30 non-autistic individuals’ prosocial willingness to exert physical effort for oneself and others, as a function of whether the beneficiary shares their neurotype or not. We compared decisions to exert effort and action energisation when participants made decisions for the self, other same-neurotype and other different-neurotype. Results showed a robust self-bias in effort discounting, with both groups choosing to exert more effort for themselves than others, and no differences between same and different neurotype others. However, while non-autistic participants showed no difference in action energisation between same and different neurotype others, autistic participants exerted significantly more force for others of the same neurotype. Implicit, but not explicit, biases held about autism played a role: in autistic participants, higher implicit autism stigma predicted differences in effort discounting between same and different neurotype others, while in non-autistic participants, implicit bias predicted differences in actual effort exerted rather than decision-making. This work has important implications for understanding how interactor neurotypes and autism-specific biases may feed into prosocial decision-making contexts such as employment, health and education settings, where autistic individuals face the everyday consideration whether to disclose their diagnostic status.