People with autism-related disorders are less likely to make irrational decisions or to be influenced by gut instincts. The study adds to the growing body of research showing that autism involves altered emotional processing.
Decision-making is a complex process, involving both intuition and analysis. Previous studies have shown that responses to problems depends on how the problems are posed, known as the “framing effect.”
Participants in a study performed a task involving deciding whether or not to gamble with a sum of money. Different groups were given effectively the same options, but phrased so that they were presented as either being a potential gain or a potential loss.
Participants without autism-related disorders were greatly affected by how the situation was presented to them. For participants with autism-related disorders, this effect was much smaller, suggesting that this latter group was less susceptible to the framing effect; in other words, they were less likely to be guided by their emotions.