Autistic People Enhance Their Selves: Autistic people are as susceptible to social desirability & self-enhancement as non-autistic people are; our results challenge the claim that autistic people are immune to reputation management

Autistic People Do Enhance Their Selves. Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Jennifer L. Stevenson, Sebastian Dern. Social Psychological and Personality Science, September 2, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619865057

Abstract: We investigated whether autistic people are less prone to self-enhance (i.e., portray themselves in socially desirable ways). Autistic (N = 130) and non-autistic (N = 130) participants first responded to social desirability items using the standard instruction to endorse each item as true or false about themselves. Then, all participants read an explanation of what social desirability items measure before responding again to the social desirability items. Self-enhancement was operationalized as participants endorsing more social desirability items before learning the explanation than after. All participants endorsed significantly more social desirability items before learning the explanation than after, F subjects(1, 258) = 57.73, p < .001, η2p = .183; F items(1, 34) = 43.04, p < .001, η2p = .559). However, autistic and non-autistic participants did not significantly differ in how many items they endorsed, either before or after reading the explanation, indicating that autistic people are as susceptible to social desirability and self-enhancement as non-autistic people are. Our results challenge the claim that autistic people are immune to reputation management.

Keywords: autism, personality, social desirability, self-enhancement