Mental State Understanding and Moral Judgment in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

Do children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) develop the ability to take into account an agent’s mental states when they are judging the morality of his or her actions? The present article aims to answer this question by reviewing recent evidence on moral reasoning on children with autism and typical development. A basic moral judgment (e.g., judgments of violations in which negative intentions are followed by negative consequences) and the ability to distinguish between conventional and moral violations appear to be spared in autism (Leslie et al., 2006). However, a closer look at the data reveals that these capacities can be explained by the tendency of ASD individuals to rely heavily on actions consequences and other external factors rather than agents’ mental states. By contrast, studies that presented typically developing (TD) children with accidental and failed attempts actions have shown that even preschoolers can display an intent-based moral judgment (e.g., Cushman et al., 2013; Margoni and Surian, 2016). The tendency to rely on outcome in ASD children is further confirmed by those studies that direcly show that ASD individuals fail to attend to the agents’ intentions when the cases are more complex or ambiguous, like in accidentally harmful actions or failed attempts to harm. We propose that the impairment in understanding others’ mind hinders the development of an intent-based moral judgment in children with ASD.