Can you spot a liar? Deception, mindreading, and the case of autism spectrum disorder.
Adults with ASD miss real-world lies far more often than typical adults, so you need to teach lie-spotting the same way you teach any other safety skill.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked the adults to watch 12 short clips of people lying or telling the truth.
Half the group had an autism diagnosis; the other half were typical adults.
Everyone guessed who was lying and said how sure they felt about each answer.
What they found
Adults with ASD picked the liars correctly only 36 % of the time — worse than chance.
Typical adults scored 61 %. Even adults with mild ASD traits did poorly.
Confidence ratings were the same in both groups, so they didn’t know they were failing.
How this fits with other research
Keintz et al. (2011) showed that kids with ASD can tell lies, but their stories fall apart later. Together the papers trace a timeline: children with ASD can produce lies, yet as adults they can’t spot lies told to them.
Carr (1994) already found that able autistic adults fail naturalistic mind-reading tasks even after passing standard false-belief tests. The new study extends that pattern to real-world deception detection.
Schuwerk et al. (2015) gave adults with ASD a brief peek at the true outcome and their implicit Theory-of-Mind eye movements improved. This hints that quick experience-based teaching might also boost lie-detection accuracy, but that has not been tested yet.
Why it matters
Your high-functioning adult clients may not realize when staff, peers, or strangers deceive them. Build explicit lie-detection lessons into social-skills groups: pause videos, highlight facial mismatches, and give immediate feedback. Practise with real job-interview or dating scenarios so the skill matters to them. One extra hour a week could save them from fraud, bullying, or social heartbreak.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Detection of deception is of fundamental importance for everyday social life and might require "mindreading" (the ability to represent others' mental states). People with diminished mindreading, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), might be at risk of manipulation because of lie detection difficulties. In Experiment 1, performance among 216 neurotypical adults on a realistic lie detection paradigm was significantly negatively associated with number of ASD traits, but not with mindreading ability. Bayesian analyses complemented null hypothesis significance testing and suggested the data supported the alternative hypothesis in this key respect. Cross validation of results was achieved by randomly splitting the full sample into two subsamples of 108 and rerunning analyses. The association between lie detection and ASD traits held in both subsamples, showing the reliability of findings. In Experiment 2, lie detection was significantly impaired in 27 adults with a diagnosis of ASD relative to 27 matched comparison participants. Results suggest that people with ASD (or ASD traits) may be particularly vulnerable to manipulation and may benefit from lie detection training. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1129-1137. © 2018 The Authors Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Detection of deception is of fundamental importance for everyday social life. People with diminished understanding of other minds, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), might be at risk of manipulation because of lie detection difficulties. We found that lie detection ability was related to how many ASD traits neurotypical people manifested and also was significantly diminished among adults with a full diagnosis of ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.09.006