Autistic people differ from non-autistic people subjectively, but not objectively in their reasoning

Autism has been linked to difficulties within the social domain and quick decision-making. The Dual Process Theory of Autism proposes that autistic people, compared to non-autistic people, tend to prefer and perform in a more deliberative and less intuitive reasoning style, suggesting enhanced rationality in autism. However, this theory has not been systematically explored across social and non-social domains. In total, 24 autistic adults and 24 age-, gender- and non-verbal cognitive ability–matched non-autistic counterparts completed subjective and objective measures of reasoning. A scenario-based comparison task was employed, covering both social and non-social domains, to assess whether participants consistently used the same strategy across domains or alternated between strategies for their forced-choice judgements. On a subjective measure of reasoning, compared to their counterparts, autistic participants self-reported lower intuition. However, there was an opposite pattern on an objective measure, in that autistic participants responded more intuitively. No significant group differences were identified between autistic and non-autistic participants on self-reported deliberation, objectively measured reflectiveness or forced-choice moral judgements across social and non-social domains. There might be a discrepancy among autistic people for their subjective preferences and objective performances in reasoning, decision-making and judgements.