The perception of social situations by children with autism spectrum disorders.
Autistic children can say a behavior is fine but their odd explanations show the rule is shaky.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Nah et al. (2011) showed short social stories to two groups of children. One group had autism. The other group was neurotypical.
Each child decided if the behavior in the story was okay or not okay. Then they explained why.
What they found
Both groups gave the same yes-or-no ratings. The autistic kids, however, gave stranger reasons. They often said, "I don’t know" or gave odd answers.
The autistic children also said normal, everyday events felt stranger than the other kids did.
How this fits with other research
Loth et al. (2010) asked autistic boys to rate which parts of events can change. The boys struggled. That study looked at flexibility. The 2011 study looked at explanations. Together they show autistic children can give a correct label but still miss the deeper rule.
Ikeda et al. (2024) tested how kids choose polite or casual speech. Autistic kids learned the words but missed how tone upsets people. This matches the 2011 finding: surface knowledge is there, social nuance is not.
Centelles et al. (2013) showed autistic children were worse at reading body-motion clips. The 2012011 paper used still stories, not videos, yet both found the same gap. Different methods, same conclusion.
Why it matters
When you ask a client, "Was that okay?" and they say "Yes," do not stop. Ask, "Why was it okay?" Their answer tells you if they truly understand the social rule. If they shrug or give a weird reason, you know where to teach next.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study investigated how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) make social judgments of social situations and provide justifications for their responses. Fifteen children with ASD and 15 typically developing children (ages from 9 to 13 years old) were presented with eight vignettes, based on the Dewey Story Test (Dewey, 1991) and developed for the purposes of this study. The participants rated the appropriateness (on a 4-point Likert scale) of the socially inappropriate event (test item) and non-social appropriate event (control item) in each vignette. Justifications for each rating were also elicited at the end of each vignette. The children with ASD rated socially inappropriate behaviors in vignettes no differently from their typically developing peers but rated control items as stranger. They also had a higher tendency to provide inappropriate/bizarre and don't know/no response justifications instead of appropriate/social justifications (that reflect social awareness). The impact of the method of eliciting social judgments of social situations and its impact on findings are discussed.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2011 · doi:10.1177/1362361309353616