Brief report: do individuals with autism spectrum disorder think they know their own minds?

The team asked autistic adults a simple question. Who knows your thoughts better: you or another person?

They also asked the same thing to adults without autism. Everyone gave ratings on a scale.

The study wanted to see if autistic people treat self-knowledge as special, like most people do.

Autistic adults rated another person as knowing their mind just as well as they did.

Non-autistic adults clearly favored their own knowledge.

The result suggests autistic people do not give their first-person view extra weight.

Dritschel et al. (2010) ran almost the same task with teens who have Asperger syndrome. They got the same pattern, so the finding holds across age groups.

Smith et al. (2008) looked at a different self-skill: monitoring one’s own actions. That skill stayed intact in autism, even though the mind-reading part was weak. The two papers together show self-awareness is not all-or-nothing; it is piece-by-piece.

Weinmann et al. (2023) tested fast perspective switching in autistic adults. They found small hiccups when shifting between self and other views. This extends the 2008 idea into real-time thinking and adds a timing problem to the story.

If a client does not trust their own inner voice, they may lean on outside cues too much. You can build lessons that practice labeling feelings first, before asking what others think. Start with simple “I feel ___ because ___” frames. Reinforce that their own report counts. Over time, fade the prompts so self-knowledge gets stronger weight in choices and self-advocacy.