What blame can tell us about autism
In the mid-1980s, a team of autism researchers theorized that one of the major features of autism is an inability to infer the thoughts of other people. This skill, known as theory of mind, comes naturally to most people — we are constantly evaluating other people’s mental states and trying to determine what they know, what they want and why they are happy or sad, angry or scared. Though there is much anecdotal evidence that this skill is impaired in autistic people, it has been difficult to show it experimentally in adults. Now, a study from MIT neuroscientists reveals that high-functioning autistic adults appear to have trouble using theory of mind to make moral judgments in certain situations.Specifically, the researchers found that autistic adults were more likely than non-autistic subjects to blame someone for accidentally causing harm to another person. This shows that their judgments rely more on the outcome...