Deception and sabotage in autistic, retarded and normal children.
We investigated autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children's ability to deceive or obstruct an opponent. When required to tell a lie (saying that a box was locked) autistic children performed significantly worse than their controls, taking into account mental age. However, they readily prevented a competitor from gaining a reward by physical manipulation (locking a box). Their success on sabotage demonstrated that their failure on deception was not due to an inability to understand the task. Performance on deception was predicted by performance on a false belief attribution task. The present findings confirm that autistic children have a specific deficit in understanding and manipulating beliefs.
Sodian
B
B
Universität München, Institut für empirische Pädagogik, Germany.
Frith
U
U
D000293:Adolescent; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D003469:Culture; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology; D008257:Machiavellianism; D008297:Male