Are autistic adults more vulnerable to criminal exploitation?

In a new study, researchers at Flinders University have tested the widely held belief that autistic adults are more vulnerable to criminal exploitation than non-autistic adults due to the difficulty of recognizing criminal intent.

“It is not uncommon for defense attorneys to argue, often supported by ‘expert’ testimony, that autistic adults have difficulty interpreting others’ intentions or reading others’ minds, making them vulnerable to being lured into criminal activity says Professor Neil Brewer, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology in the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work.

“Such arguments reflect the widespread view that difficulties in recognizing the intentions, emotions and motivations of others are fundamental features of autism.

“However, this perspective may not hold up to scrutiny, and we have found that autistic adults are generally no more prone to becoming involved in criminal activity than non-autistic adults.”

“Furthermore, the mind-reading difficulties often associated with autism are far from universal among autistic adults.”

Published in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, Law and human behaviorformer Ph.D. Student Zoe Michael and her supervisor Professor Neil Brewer developed and used a novel and real-life paradigm – the Suspicious Activity Paradigm, or SAP – to assess how well adults can recognize and respond to cues that indicate social interactions are at their peak could achieve in criminal behavior.

The study involved 197 participants – 102 autistic adults and 95 non-autistic adults – who role-played scenarios that, as they developed, increasingly suggested criminal intent on the part of those they interacted with.

They were then asked how they would react at various points throughout the scenarios to assess their ability to recognize and respond to the suspicious actions of others and thus assess their susceptibility to unintentionally becoming involved in criminal activity.

“We found that overall, both autistic and non-autistic adults responded similarly to suspicious behavior in different scenarios,” says Professor Brewer.

“Importantly, autistic adults did not demonstrate lower rates of mistrust or adaptive responses over the course of the scenarios compared to their non-autistic counterparts. Nor did it take them any longer to recognize the potentially problematic nature of the interaction.”

Building on previous research, the study concluded that verbal intelligence and theory of mind (ToM) – a term that describes the ability to take perspective or read the minds of others – predicted a person’s ability to detect suspicious activity and react to it.

“Our results suggest that the ability to understand the perspectives and intentions of others – rather than the presence of an autism diagnosis – was a key factor influencing their vulnerability to crime,” he says.

In other words, while autistic people who had difficulty reading others’ intentions were vulnerable, the same was true for their non-autistic peers.

However, it is important to note that there was a relatively small proportion of autistic individuals whose performance on the mindreading measure was below that of all non-autistic samples, a finding that was consistently replicated by the Flinders research team that developed the measure .

This suggests that there will be some autistic individuals who are likely to be particularly at risk due to difficulties with mind reading – but such difficulties cannot be assumed.

“Therefore, rather than defense lawyers and doctors assuming and arguing that a diagnosis of autism automatically signals a particular vulnerability to the temptation to commit crime, it is important to formally assess and demonstrate that a criminal suspect or defendant has significant difficulty reading minds, which “probably made them vulnerable,” he adds.