Thus, unconscious rather than conscious attitudes may be more influential in guiding prosocial behaviour. These could be addressed – promoting greater acceptance of autistic people and reducing internalised stigma – to foster supportive relationships between & within neurotypes.

For autistic participants, stronger implicit biases predicted lower motivation to put in effort for autistic peers. For non-autistic participants, implicit biases did not affect decisions, but predicted greater effort exerted for non-autistic compared to autistic peers.

Implicit, but not explicit, biases held about autism played a role...

When looking at how much actual effort participants put in, non-autistic participants put in comparable effort for other autistic and non-autistic participants, whilst autistic participants put in more actual effort for their fellow autistic than non-autistic participants.

When looking at choices, we saw a robust self-bias, with both groups choosing to put in more effort for themselves than others, and no differences between same and different neurotype others.

We asked autistic and non-autistic adults to squeeze a hand grip to earn credits for themselves, for others of the same neurotype, or for others of a different neurotype. They could choose to squeeze for credit or rest for no credit on every trial...

Thanks so much! ☺️☺️

Thank you!!

Thank you Jade! Hope everything is good with you ☺️☺️

And huge thanks to all of the people who made this work possible - particularly Jennifer Cook, Sophie Sowden-Carvalho, and the lived experience experts in Birmingham Psychology Autism Research Team! ✨✨✨

Thanks so much to the autism consultancy groups in Hong Kong, the UK, and the US for your help with our study - we are really grateful for your input.

Reposts to thread really appreciated ❤️

Our findings underscore the crucial need to combat misconceptions about, and stigma towards autism, particularly in Hong Kong🧵6/6

Knowledge and explicit stigma differed across countries, even after accounting for covariates: students in Hong Kong displayed less accurate knowledge, and higher explicit stigma towards autism, than those in the UK and US. Implicit biases did not differ across countries🧵5/6