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Judgment of Intentionality and Moral Evaluation in Individuals with High Functioning Autism

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Abstract

In this study, we investigated the relationships between judgments of intentionality and moral evaluation in individuals with High Functioning Autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS). HFA or AS are neurodevelopmental disorders characterised by severe deficits in communication and social functioning. Impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others, are thought to be the core features of autism. Of all mental states, the concept of ‘intentional action’ is particularly important. People normally distinguish between actions that are performed intentionally and those that are performed unintentionally and this distinction plays a crucial role in social understanding and moral judgment. Recently, Knobe (Analysis 63: 190–193, 2003a), (Philosophical Psychology 16: 309–324, 2003b) showed that people’s moral evaluations might serve as input to the process by which people intuitively arrive at the intentionality judgments. Here, by using two pairs of vignettes, the Knobe’s Harm/Help cases and Murder/Bull’s-eye cases, we showed that, as already observed in typical population, in individuals with HFA/AS judgment of intentional action is informed by the moral appreciation of the action outcome. However, the two groups differed on praise judgments and moral justifications, suggesting that these processes were poorly influenced by the agent’s psychological states. We concluded that, although under certain circumstances, individuals with HFA/AS and people with typical development have similar intuitive judgments of intentionality, over-assignment of praise judgments and the reduced use of folk-psychological concepts in moral judgment likely reflect difficulties using intentionality information for moral reasoning.

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Notes

  1. Carpenter et al. (2001) have suggested that the comprehension of intentions is not severely impaired in people with ASD. They reported that young children with autism were able to understand children’s understanding of others’ unfulfilled intentions and the goal state of an intended action, suggesting that although they have a slightly less complex understanding of others’ intentions, disturbances in this domain are not as marked as deficits in ToM and joint attention. However, the authors raised the possibility that their finding of no autism-specific deficits in this understanding may be a result of relatively poor performance by their control group. Moreover, for criticisms of the unfulfilled intention paradigm, see D’Entremont and Yazbek (2007) and Huang et al. (2002).

  2. For each story, the following six questions were asked: 1) the detection question: In the story did someone say something that they should not have said?”; 2) the person identification question: Who said something they should not have said?”; 3) the content question: “What did they say that they should not have said?”; 4) the explanation question: “Why shouldn’t they have said it?”; 5) the belief question: Did they know/remember that?”; 6) the empathy question: “How did the listener feel?”

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Fondation FondaMental and Fondation Orange to TZ and ML. The authors wish to thank Richard Carter, Paul Egré, Pierre Jacob, Joshua Knobe, Edouard Machery, Maria Grazia Rossi, Liane Young and the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We also thank Astrid Stopin for clinical and neuropsychological evaluations.

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Correspondence to Tiziana Zalla.

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Zalla, T., Leboyer, M. Judgment of Intentionality and Moral Evaluation in Individuals with High Functioning Autism. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 681–698 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0048-1

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