Decision Making

How would your ability to make decisions be affected if you had autism? Think about it. If you were not influenced by emotions (such as jealousy, greed, etc.) you might make decisions based purely on the facts. And, this seems to be what happens. Typically, the way we make decisions can be influenced by how the decision choices are "framed." For example, we are more likely to agree to a surgical procedure if we are told "You have an 80% chance of surviving the procedure." rather than being told "You have a 20% chance of not surviving the procedure." - even though this is the same information! In a sense we are distracted by the emotional content. Research in the UK with people who had autism and average IQ scores showed that they were less likely to be influenced by these types of emotional "framing" techniques and more likely to make decisions based solely on the facts. This type of research gives us a glimpse of emotional lives of people with this disorder.

Reference: De Martino, B., Harrison, N. A., Knafo, S., Bird, G., & Dolan, R. J. (2008). Explaining enhanced logical consistency during decision making in autism. Journal of Neuroscience, 28(42), 10746-10750.