fraac wrote:
Yes. This has been studied.
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/17302.shortQuote:
Abstract
People act more prosocially when they know they are watched by others, an everyday observation borne out by studies from behavioral economics, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. This effect is thought to be mediated by the incentive to improve one's social reputation, a specific and possibly uniquely human motivation that depends on our ability to represent what other people think of us. Here we tested the hypothesis that social reputation effects are selectively impaired in autism, a developmental disorder characterized in part by impairments in reciprocal social interactions but whose underlying cognitive causes remain elusive. When asked to make real charitable donations in the presence or absence of an observer, matched healthy controls donated significantly more in the observer's presence than absence, replicating prior work. By contrast, people with high-functioning autism were not influenced by the presence of an observer at all in this task. However, both groups performed significantly better on a continuous performance task in the presence of an observer, suggesting intact general social facilitation in autism. The results argue that people with autism lack the ability to take into consideration what others think of them and provide further support for specialized neural systems mediating the effects of social reputation.
I pointed out that they didn't test ability to take into consideration what others think of them, which could be done by telling them upfront to act in a way that made them look good. They tested whether nonautistics have no ability to choose. Usual blinkered crap conclusions.
Or...
isn't it just as probable that Autistics don't care what the observer thinks?
There's something else blatantly missing in that article. They didn't bother to say anything about how the Autistic donations compared with the control group.
What if they were higher? That may indicate that Autistics were more conscientious to begin with, and wouldn't have any reason to feel any need to impress their observers.
What if they were lower? That may indicate Autistics are stingier, and don't care what anyone thinks. Or it could indicate they don't have as good a concept of what a fair donation is, so it doesn't matter anyway whether anyone is watching.
What if they were a mix if higher and lower? That might say something else altogether, but I'm not sure what.
Way too little information in that article.
Too little information always = crap conclusions.
_________________
I'm not likely to be around much longer. As before when I first signed up here years ago, I'm finding that after a long hiatus, and after only a few days back on here, I'm spending way too much time here again already. So I'm requesting my account be locked, banned or whatever. It's just time. Until then, well, I dunno...
29 Nov 2011, 1:13 pm
