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An Investigation of the Cognitive Factors Underlying Reputation Management in Children with and without Autism
Adults often change their behaviour when others are around to manage what people think of them, that is, their reputation. There is currently mixed evidence as to whether children with autism can manage – or think about – their reputation, with the few existing studies suggest that there is much variation in this ability. Understanding the source of this variability is of theoretical and practical import. Potential sources include theory of mind, executive function, social motivation, and understanding of reciprocity. Yet these factors have not been examined in the context of reputation management either in typical development or in autism.
Objectives:
The current study aimed to (1) investigate reputation management in children with and without autism and (2) elucidate the cognitive processes underlying reputation management in both typical development and autism using an individual differences approach.
Methods:
Sixteen children with autism and 16 typical children, aged between 7 and 14 years, and of similar verbal mental age and gender, participated in this ongoing study. Children took part in two tasks measuring reputation management itself; one task in which they played a dictator game once when alone and once when watched by a peer (implicit reputation task) and another task in which they had the opportunity to protect their reputation (explicit reputation task). They also received a battery of tasks indexing theory of mind, executive function, reciprocity and social motivation.
Results:
There was no significant group difference on the task tapping implicit reputation management, as it appeared that neither group was particularly sensitive to being watched (i.e., showed no observer effect). There was also no group differences on the explicit reputation task, although in this case autistic children were just as likely to want to protect their reputation as typical children. While children with autism had additional difficulties with theory of mind, there were no group differences on our measures of social motivation. Within-group correlational analyses showed that individual differences in reciprocity, IQ and executive function correlated with the effect of being watched for children with autism. For typical children, social reward and executive function variables correlated with this observer effect.
Conclusions:
Both children with and without autism may not be particularly sensitive to reputation when it is implicit in nature. This result could mean that subtle reputation management, so prevalent in typical adults, is a skill with relatively protracted development. Interestingly, both groups were keen to protect their reputation when it was explicit that their reputation was at risk. This finding supports previous research that demonstrates that children with autism can present themselves in a certain light when asked to do so. Our findings also suggest that there may be different factors relating to reputation management in typical and autistic children, which may explain some of the variability found in the tendency to manage reputation.