Moral foundations theory in autism spectrum disorder: A qualitative investigation

Abstract

Morality is important for how humans treat each other and non-human animals. Differences in moral reasoning have been found between autistic and neurotypical individuals. Research in this area has relied on accounts of moral psychology that suggest increasingly mature moral principles that develop from taking the perspectives of others. Yet, even autistic individuals, who sometimes differ in their ability to take others’ perspectives, make moral judgements that are similar to neurotypical individuals. Moral foundations theory suggests that moral psychology is not hierarchical but differs depending on culture. Moral foundations theory has not yet been investigated among autistic individuals. This qualitative study used interviews and qualitative analysis as a first attempt at understanding how moral foundations theory fits with autistic moral thinking. We found that all five moral foundations of moral foundations theory were represented in the interviews, yet certain foundations appeared more prominent than others. The autistic adults interviewed in our study discussed issues of care and fairness more than of loyalty, authority or purity when prompted to discuss moral transgressions. Future research should use quantitative methods to compare groups of autistic and neurotypical individuals to clarify similarities and differences in moral thinking between the groups.

Lay abstract

Morality is important for how humans treat each other and non-human animals. Differences in moral thinking have been found between autistic and neurotypical individuals. This research has relied on ways of thinking about moral psychology that suggest that mature morals develop as individuals learn to take the perspectives of others. Yet, even autistic individuals, who sometimes differ in their ability to take others’ perspectives, make moral judgements that are similar to neurotypical individuals. Moral foundations theory suggests that moral psychology is not hierarchical but differs depending on culture. This theory could therefore help make sense of similarities and differences in autistic and neurotypical moral thinking. Moral foundations theory has not yet been investigated among autistic individuals. In this study, we interviewed autistic adults as a first attempt at understanding how moral foundations theory fits with autistic moral thinking. We found that all five moral foundations of moral foundations theory were represented in the interviews, yet certain foundations appeared more prominent than others. The autistic adults interviewed in our study discussed issues of care and fairness more than of loyalty, authority or purity when prompted to discuss moral transgressions. Future research should use quantitative methods to compare groups of autistic and neurotypical individuals to clarify similarities and differences in moral thinking between the groups.

Keywords

autism spectrum disorders commonsense psychology ethics moral emotion moral foundations theory morality social cognition and social behaviour

Autism spectrum disorder (hereafter autism) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by differences in social communication and social interaction, and the presence of repetitive or restricted interests or behaviour (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Differences in social cognition between autistic¹ and neurotypical individuals are also common (Gallese, 2006). Moral reasoning is a form of social cognition that has been posited by some to be atypical among autistic individuals (e.g. Takeda et al., 2007; Zalla et al., 2011). Researchers have investigated whether the development and execution of moral judgement and reasoning differs in this population compared with neurotypical individuals (for a review, see Dempsey et al., 2019).

Rationalist accounts of morality have dominated research in moral development for several decades. Rationalist theories position social cognition as the foundation of moral development (Kohlberg, 1971; Piaget, 1932; Turiel, 1983), emphasizing the role of various aspects of commonsense psychology, such as perspective taking and role taking. Commonsense psychology refers to the human tendency to attempt to make sense of relationships and interactions by representing the internal states of others (Moore, 2006). This requires identifying others as psychologically similar to, yet distinct from, oneself.

Autistic individuals show altered development of aspects of commonsense psychology (Baron-Cohen et al., 2013), including empathy, that is, a response to another based on her or his circumstances (Hoffman, 1987). However, the way researchers define and measure empathy rests on the assumption of prescriptive norms for social responses to others (Nicolaidis et al., 2018), which may be inappropriate given that autistic individuals process social information in atypical ways. Indeed, autistic responses to others could be appropriate given their unique social cognition, yet seem inappropriate to neurotypical individuals (i.e. the double empathy problem; Milton, 2012). Thus, differences in empathy between autistic and neurotypical individuals can be understood as a bidirectional problem.

Relying on traditional definitions of empathy and rationalist theories of morality would suggest delayed or atypical moral development among autistic individuals. However, a recent systematic review of moral psychology in autism (Dempsey et al., 2019) suggested that only minor differences in moral psychology exist between autistic and neurotypical individuals. In particular, moral judgement, that is, determining whether transgressors were morally right or wrong in their actions, was shown to be generally similar between autistic and neurotypical individuals (e.g. Akechi et al., 2018; Blair, 1996; Margoni et al., 2019), whereas the nature of justifications for those decisions, that is, moral reasoning, differed (e.g. Grant et al., 2005; Shulman et al., 2012), as did the degree of blame or culpability assigned to moral transgressors (e.g. Bellesi et al., 2018; Channon et al., 2011; Koster-Hale et al., 2012).

Relatively intact moral judgement among autistic individuals with atypical commonsense psychology calls into question rationalist accounts of morality that assert the primacy of commonsense psychology. Furthermore, the subtle differences that have been found have often been interpreted as deficits, as is common when autistic individuals are compared to neurotypical individuals (Akhtar & Jaswal, 2013). Researchers have failed to justify their interpretations of neurotypical superiority beyond citing the hierarchy of moral reasoning associated with rationalist theories of moral development (e.g. Moran et al., 2011; Salvano-Pardieu et al., 2016).

Haidt (2012) developed moral foundations theory, which relies less heavily on commonsense psychology than rationalist accounts. Haidt’s (2012) intuitionist account proposes that children have an innate capacity to internalize moral intuitions across five social contexts, or foundations, that humans have evolved to recognize as morally salient. The innateness and modularity of the five foundations has been debated (Haidt & Joseph, 2011; Suhler & Churchland, 2011); however, a full discussion of the controversy surrounding Haidt’s theory is beyond the scope of this article. The five foundations are care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. The relative importance of these foundations depends on early cultural environments that may reinforce the development of some moral foundations over others. To illustrate, Kohlberg’s (1969, 1971) stages describe moral reasoning based on authority as less mature than reasoning based on individual rights. In contrast, moral foundations theorists assert that reasoning based on authority represents a different (not lesser) moral foundation, the importance of which is determined by one’s culture (Graham et al., 2009). Given the emergent conceptualization of autism as a culture (Davidson, 2008; Jaarsma & Welin, 2012), differences in moral reasoning from that of neurotypical people could result from differing salience of moral foundations in autistic culture.

Haidt’s (2003) moral intuitionism implies that moral judgements follow from emotional, pre-rational intuitions or emotions. For Haidt, emotions are classed as moral if they are connected with others’ welfare. This position is also not without controversy: Jones (2006), for example, argues that moral judgements are only meaningful if they are at least responsive to reasoning. Others argue that a broader scope of emotions can be moral by relating to cosmic order and meaning (McGeer, 2008), or that describing emotions as ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ conflates notions of whether emotions are fitting versus morally acceptable (d’Arms & Jacobson, 2000). Despite controversy regarding the theory, we adopt Haidt’s position for the purpose of investigating the applicability of his theory among autistic adults. Moral emotions, then, are divided into four broad categories: (1) those that arise in judgement of wrongdoers, for example, anger and disgust; (2) those that arise in response to judging oneself as a moral agent, for example, shame and guilt; (3) those that arise in response to victims of moral transgressions, for example, empathy and compassion; and (4) those that arise in response to moral exemplars, for example, elevation and gratitude (Haidt, 2003). As such, moral intuitionism relies more heavily on emotional responding than discursive reasoning and perspective taking than do rationalist accounts of moral psychology. The role of emotion in autistic moral judgement is not clear (Dempsey et al., 2019), especially given high rates of co-occurring alexithymia, that is, reduced ability to recognize one’s own emotions, among autistic individuals (Hill et al., 2004).

Using an intuitionist approach in investigating moral reasoning may more accurately convey social cognitive strengths and weaknesses among autistic people than those employing rationalist accounts. To our knowledge, moral foundations theory has not yet been investigated among autistic individuals. We therefore conducted interviews with autistic adults as a preliminary study of moral foundations theory in autism. Our aim was to investigate whether the theory’s five foundations were considered morally salient among autistic adults. We also aimed to assess the degree to which moral emotions motivated judgements in autistic moral thought, as theorized in moral foundations theory. To further these aims, autistic adults were asked to explain their moral reasoning and emotions related to past situations in which they felt they had been wronged or had witnessed another person experiencing a moral wrong.

Methods

Research team and reflexivity

The first author conducted and analysed all interviews. She is a clinical psychology PhD student with undergraduate degrees in psychology and philosophy. She has experience with diagnostic assessment and mental health intervention with autistic youth and adults, in addition to training and experience interviewing people in both clinical and research settings. She contacted each participant prior to study participation to discuss the study. At the time of the interview, the participants were aware of the interviewer’s goal of exploring moral thinking in autism from a strengths-based perspective as part of her dissertation research. However, participants had not yet been introduced to moral foundations theory.

Bias

Moral foundations theorists have shown that political orientation, culture and socioeconomic status may influence the relevance of each moral foundation to an individual’s moral thinking (Koleva et al., 2012). The first author identifies as a white, middle-class woman who is politically left wing. These characteristics may make her more likely to prioritize care/harm and fairness/reciprocity foundations over in-group/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations. Her interest in the topic stems from a desire to better understand the plurality of moral convictions through a non-hierarchical lens to lessen tension between groups and improve societal functioning. She was motivated to conduct this research among autistic participants to help describe and understand morality in autism from a Strengths- rather than deficit-based perspective.

Participants

Participants were recruited using advertisements through Autism Nova Scotia, communication with autistic participants in previous research, word of mouth and community clinicians. Participants were contacted by email or phone to assess interest in participation, and follow-up telephone calls were made to describe the study in more detail and schedule a research visit. All contacted individuals (n = 6) agreed to participate in the study and provided written informed consent. This study was approved by the IWK Health Centre’s Research Ethics Board.

Setting

Interviews were conducted by the first author at Dalhousie University in the Early Social Development Lab conference room. A volunteer research trainee was present during two of the interviews as an educational experience.

Materials

Semi-structured morality interview

The interview was semi-structured and used the critical incidents technique (Flanagan, 1954). See Supplemental Appendix for the interview template. Participants were asked to reflect on and describe morally laden situations that affected them. They were asked to indicate why they thought each situation was morally wrong or right, and how they felt about it. First, participants were invited to describe any morally laden situation that came to mind (i.e. unprompted). After three incidents were shared, the interviewer probed for situations representing moral foundations that had not yet been discussed (i.e. prompted). As part of a larger study, participants were also asked to share their opinions about a measure of moral foundations designed for neurotypical youth and to comment on the potential of the proposed research programme to contribute to the autism community. The results of those portions of the interviews are not reported here.

Audio recording equipment

An Olympus digital voice recorder (Model WS-802) was used to audio record interviews.

NVivo software

QSR International’s (2015) NVivo 11 software for Windows was used to facilitate coding of data for qualitative data analysis.

Procedures

Each interview was audio-recorded using a digital recording device. A professional transcriptionist who was blind to the study’s research questions, coding scheme and participant diagnoses transcribed all interviews.

Data analysis

Data were analysed using thematic analysis, a method of identifying themes in qualitative data commonly used by psychology researchers (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Inductive, semantic coding from a realist perspective was used.

The first and second authors read the entire corpus of transcribed data to familiarize themselves with the contents and generate reflections on the data prior to coding. Next, the first author coded statements from each transcribed interview. Statements were defined as ‘phrases, assertions, comments, and attributions which retained a sense of completeness and had an [sic] homogeneous object’ (Sani & Reicher, 1998). Codes were then collated and organized into initial themes. The first author reviewed these themes to confirm that coded statements reflected the pattern of the category into which they were sorted. Additional statements were coded and themes were renamed as appropriate. Next, the second author performed analytic auditing on the coded data to ensure that all extracts were coded appropriately according to the semantic, realist approach. She also assessed internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity (Patton, 1990) to check whether data within each theme were meaningfully connected, and that themes were distinct.

The first author evaluated the extent to which final themes captured patterns of moral sentiments and reasoning represented within the data. Upon concluding that individual codes were supportive of identified themes, and that these themes were adequate to describe the data, codes were renamed as appropriate and a final thematic map was created (Figure 1). A narrative account of the themes, with support from tables of coded data extracts, is presented in section ‘Results’.

Figure 1.

Coding tree for qualitative analysis of moral thinking among autistic adults.

After all interviews were coded and extracts isolated as evidence of themes, participants were invited to participate in member reflections (Tracy, 2010). All participants were presented with the findings via email and asked to comment on whether they saw their contributions reflected in the findings. The researcher collaborated with participants to enrich the interpretation of the interviews and refine themes as appropriate (Tracy, 2010).

Community involvement

Autistic community partners were not involved in the development of the research question or outcome measures, the design of the study or its implementation. However, the autistic adults who participated in this study contribute to the interpretation of the results through member reflections.

Results

Participants

The participant characteristics are shown in Table 1.² Participants were aged 18 or older, were fluent in English and had sufficient receptive and productive verbal skills to participate in the interview. If participants were not known to the research team, language skills were assessed by the first author during the initial telephone interview.

Table 1.

Demographic information of autistic adults.

Participant	Age	Gender	Social issues	Economic issues	Ethnicity	Level of education	Employment status	Work	Household income
P1	23	Non-binary	Slightly liberal	Slightly liberal	White	Bachelor’s degree	Student	Library circulation assistant	–
P2	38	Non-binary	Very liberal	Slightly liberal	White	Trade school	Part time and social assistance	Clerical	<20,000
P3	37	Man	Liberal	Liberal	White	Master’s degree	Full time	Public service	–
P4	50	Non-binary	Liberal	Conservative	White/Indigenous	High school	Part time	Magazine editor	60,000–99,000
P5	22	Woman	Very liberal	Slightly liberal	White	Bachelor’s degree	Student	Student	<20,000
P6	41	Man	Very liberal	Very liberal	White	Master’s degree	Self-employed full time	Translator	100,000–139,000

Morality interview themes

Findings addressed (1) situations that triggered the five moral foundations theorized by Haidt (2012) and (2) emotions elicited by these situations. Themes and subthemes are elaborated below. Care/harm and fairness/reciprocity foundations were referenced more frequently during the unprompted versus prompted portion of the interviews; in-group/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity were more often referenced in the prompted versus unprompted section of the interview (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Frequency of references to each foundation in the prompted versus unprompted portions of interviews with autistic adults.

Participant	Foundation
	Care/harm		Fairness/reciprocity		In-group/loyalty		Authority/respect		Purity/sanctity
	Unprompted	Prompted	Unprompted	Prompted	Unprompted	Prompted	Unprompted	Prompted	Unprompted	Prompted
P1	18	22	23	4	1	6	3	12	1	6
P2	23	17	7	9	1	5	3	14	1	12
P3	14	0	12	2	1	8	9	6	1	0
P4	22	6	36	4	12	1	1	14	5	7
P5	17	9	21	6	1	11	0	16	0	1
P6	11	0	14	5	0	4	0	2	0	1
Total	105	54	113	30	16	35	16	64	8	27

Theme: care/harm

Emotional harm to a human (Clifford et al., 2015), physical harm to a human (Clifford et al., 2015; Graham et al., 2011) and physical harm to a non-human animal (Clifford et al., 2015; Graham et al., 2011) were important elicitors of the care/harm foundation for participants in this study. In addition, respondents endorsed care for the environment (n = 4) and emotional care for animals as morally relevant. See Table 3 for examples and quotes in support of the care/harm theme and its subthemes.

Table 3.

Care/harm theme and subtheme examples from interviews with autistic adults.

Theme/subtheme	Participant	Example
Care/harm towards the environment	P2	‘I feel strongly about the environment’.
	P4	‘I care about the earth over everything else’.
	P5	‘Saving the environment [is morally right]’.
Physical care/harm towards humans	P6	‘Society definitely has the capacity to provide everyone with their basic needs but we’re not doing that. So there’s not really a good argument for not doing that in my mind’.
Physical care/harm towards humans	P2	In politics, it is important to ‘do right by the little guy’, and ‘say no to big money once in a while’.
Emotional care/harm towards humans	P3	It is morally wrong to separate migrant families in part ‘because it would make them feel bad’.
Emotional care/harm towards humans	P6	‘Language extermination’ is morally incorrect because of the value of language to peoples’ sense of culture and identity.
Emotional care/harm towards the disabled	P1	‘People can be very judgemental . . . we need to get past our own bias and we need to stop comparing other people to a sort of standard that we have’.
	P2	Some people ‘think autistics are freaks’.
	P4	Sometimes disabled people are commoditized to bolster others’ fame or prestige through ‘inspiration porn’: ‘the person’s in a wheelchair, they’re marrying someone who’s not in a wheelchair. The family organizes that the person stands up to have the dance with the wife’.
Emotional care/harm towards animals	P1	A veterinarian’s home visit to euthanize a family pet was morally correct because it would have been ‘traumatic to take [the pet] out of her home’.
Physical care/harm towards animals	P2	Notepads can be made out of elephant excrement which ‘is a big step because . . . if this takes off then the elephant is worth more to them alive than dead. In which case . . . it’s not harming [elephants via poaching]’.

Subtheme: physical care/harm towards humans

All participants indicated that physical care for humans is morally correct. Value in helping others was expressed by three participants. It was deemed particularly important to help the disadvantaged. P6 shared that it is morally right to protect the vulnerable. Many participants indicated that killing is morally wrong, along with mistreatment of marginalized groups, separating immigrant families, paedophilia, abuse, assault and violence.

Subtheme: emotional care/harm towards humans

Three participants shared that it is morally right to care for the emotional well-being of humans. When describing the circumstances under which a beloved family pet was euthanized, P1 shared that the veterinarian did the morally right thing by performing a home visit. P5 shared that it would be morally correct to comfort a woman when someone they knew accidentally struck the woman’s cat in an automobile accident. All participants indicated that it is morally wrong to harm humans emotionally.

Subtheme: emotional care/harm towards the disabled

Two participants indicated that it is important to care for individuals who live with disabilities. For example, P4 shared that getting the disability support and accommodation they needed at work was morally right. This was in part because it empowered them in the workplace. Three participants indicated that it is morally wrong to harm disabled people.

Subtheme: emotional care/harm towards animals

P1 described that, during the euthanization of their family pet, part of the reason that the veterinarian’s home visit was morally correct is that it would have been ‘traumatic to take [the pet] out of her home’.

Subtheme: physical care/harm towards animals

Two participants endorsed the importance of physical care for animals. For example, P5 noted that reckless driving leading to the death of a pet was morally wrong.

Theme: fairness/reciprocity

All participants expressed the salience of the fairness/reciprocity foundation. Unfairness was explicitly deemed morally wrong by three participants. Many subthemes emphasizing fairness/reciprocity were elicited and are described below (see also Table 4).

Table 4.

Fairness/reciprocity theme and subtheme examples from interviews with autistic adults.

Theme/subtheme	Participant	Example
Fairness/	P3	‘As far as the ruling party is concerned, law is what keeps people in line. And that the law actually doesn’t affect [the ruling party] at all’.
Reciprocity	P5	It would be wrong to steal a lost item because ‘[the owner has] done nothing to me’.
Inequality	P6	Human equality is important regardless of ‘gender, sexual orientation, ethnicities, [or] nationality’.
Inequality based on disability	P1	It is unfair that ‘verbal communication is valued in our society, and it’s considered the standard norm. People who deviate any way from what we consider normal are seen as inferior’.
Inequality based on disability	P4	‘The notion that being disabled means that you cannot contribute into society, I find that not a very moral statement’.
Honesty	P3	‘One of things I hate most is insincerity. Like when people pretend they’re doing something for one reason . . . but really that’s not the reason at all. It’s just because it was an unfavourable result for them’.
Aggregation of resources or power	P6	‘A very small group of people [make] these decisions that are going to make things really awful for people in the future. And to my mind they don’t have any right to choose those consequences for other people’.
Cheating/freeriding	P1	‘When people study for a test and they don’t cheat, that’s fair’.
Denial of rights	P4	‘I don’t think anyone should deprive anyone else of their basic rights to have their needs met and pursue their own happiness’.

Subtheme: inequality

P4 and P6 described situations that were morally wrong based on inequality in relation to characteristics such as gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity.

Subtheme: inequality based on disability

Three participants stressed the immorality of unequal treatment of the disabled. P1, P2 and P4 stressed that including disabled people in broader society would be morally correct.

Subtheme: honesty

P4 and P5 indicated that they value being honest and truthful. P1 indicated that trustworthiness is morally correct. Dishonesty was seen as morally wrong by four participants.

Subtheme: aggregation of resources or power

P3 and P6 emphasized that it is morally wrong to abuse power. Five participants stressed the unfairness of accruing resources by stealing. P2 asserted that capitalism is morally wrong because it benefits only a few people.

Subtheme: cheating/free-riding

P1 and P5 shared that cheating is morally wrong.

Subtheme: denial of rights

P6 was strongly opposed to denying individuals their basic human rights. P4 shared this emphasis on the right to self-determination.

Theme: ingroup/loyalty

Although all participants endorsed the importance of this foundation to some degree, almost all coded references were from the prompted portion of the interview. P1 shared that they felt betrayed when everyone in school except them seemed to be aware that no buses would be available to drive them home one day. P4 shared, unprompted, that they value loyalty in interpersonal relationships and that infidelity is morally wrong. They also indicated that keeping one’s word is morally correct. P5 shared P4’s view that infidelity is morally wrong. P6 indicated that it was morally wrong when a friend betrayed them by passively allowing others to adopt and hold an untrue, negative view of them.

Subtheme: political loyalty

P3 described that betrayal of international alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is morally wrong. They also indicated that when governments foster international alliances with erstwhile enemies this is morally wrong if the new alliance is a betrayal to previous allies. P2 indicated that it is morally wrong when governments betray their own people. See Table 5 for a quote in support of this subtheme.

Table 5.

In-Group/loyalty subtheme example from interviews with autistic adults.

Theme	Participant	Example
Political loyalty	P2	Namely, German media coverage of the Hindenburg disaster: ‘the Nazi forces of the day then tried to churn up the people, saying that it was an allied plot against the . . . fatherland. When it was an accident as far as they could tell . . . They stirred up their own people’.

Theme: authority/respect

Important signifiers of the salience of the authority foundation such as respect for others and their property were deemed to be morally relevant by all participants, particularly in the prompted portions of their interviews. P3 described that destroying someone’s property would be morally wrong. P6 asserted that an employee stealing from or sabotaging an employer who had treated the employee well would be immoral. See Table 6 for examples and quotes in support of the authority/respect theme and its subthemes.

Table 6.

Authority/respect theme and subtheme examples from interviews with autistic adults.

Theme/subtheme	Participant	Example
Authority/respect	P4	‘I really value respect above love. I can’t have love without respect. So, I find that to be a morally right thing’.
Laws, rules and convention	P3	‘Following proper procedures just in general’ is morally right.
Authority figures have special responsibilities	P3	‘[the United States (US) president] represents the US on the international stage [and] there are certain duties that come along with that . . . there are certain actions then that wouldn’t be morally wrong on a personal level that are [morally wrong in that role]’.
Authority not morally salient	P5	‘My whole family has had issues with authority figures’.
Authority not morally salient	P6	Sometimes defying authority is the moral thing to do: ‘[being a Nazi defector] would be a moral thing to do if you found yourself in that situation’.
Rejection of traditional gender roles	P2	‘Which society actually created male domination or masculinity anyway? . . . Which society actually decided that men can have all this power?’
Respect must be earned	P5	‘I don’t hold respect for people just because they’re an authority figure. They have to show me respect too’.

Subtheme: laws, rules and convention

The importance of laws and rules was asserted by three participants. P3 shared that we need laws that prevent large numbers of people from behaving in ways that would be harmful to society.

Subtheme: authority figures have special responsibilities

Four participants reported that some authority figures have special responsibilities that they are morally bound to fulfil. For instance, P1 described that a teacher was morally wrong to help a student in need of special assistance to write an exam.

Subtheme: authority not morally salient

Although many participants identified authority transgressions as morally wrong in certain instances, a majority of participants (n = 5) demonstrated flexibility in the applicability of this foundation to different circumstances.

Subtheme: rejection of traditional gender roles

P2 returned many times to the notion that traditional gender roles may be harmful.

Subtheme: respect must be earned

P2 and P5 stressed that respect is not based on being in a position of authority, but that respect must be earned. P1 shared that they also hold this view when asked to review the results of this study.

Theme: purity/sanctity

As with the ingroup/loyalty and authority/respect themes, this theme was derived almost entirely from the prompted portion of the interview. P1 spurned acts that were degrading such as spitting on the sidewalk or swearing in public. P2 indicated that it is wrong to insinuate that women are unchaste in an insulting manner. P4 shared that graveyards are sacred and that it is immoral to destroy a person’s grave, even if that person had not lived a good life and no living relatives were harmed by the disrespect shown. All participants emphasized the importance of human dignity. See Table 7 for examples and quotes in support of the purity/sanctity theme.

Table 7.

Purity/sanctity theme examples from interviews with autistic adults.

Participant	Example
P2	When discussing how people overemphasize the importance of sexual activity, P2 said, ‘you don’t have to have that primal . . . on your mind all the time . . . in essence it degrades you too because there are a million more intelligent things you can be thinking about’.
P1	Unprompted, P1 condemned the fact that ‘people with severe or complex needs and disabilities, they’re not seen as human sometimes’.
P2	When describing vitriol espoused against the Rohingya people, P2 stated unprompted, ‘has he ever stopped to think that maybe they’re human beings?’

Theme: moral emotions

All participants indicated having experienced anger, annoyance or frustration in response to moral situations. P5 and P1 demonstrated disgust. Guilt was mentioned by four participants. Shame was not explicitly indicated but two people expressed embarrassment. The positive moral emotion of elevation was not explicitly described, but four participants cited happiness, connection, excitement, joy or hopefulness in response to positive moral acts. See Table 8 for examples and quotes in support of the moral emotions theme and its subthemes.

Table 8.

Examples of moral emotions from interviews with autistic adults.

Theme	Participant	Example
Anger	P6	‘[Politicians are] putting their time and energy into preventing people from getting access to healthcare . . . rather than . . . dozens of things they could be putting their time and energy into. Yeah, that’s very frustrating to me’.
Disgust	P1	‘If I’m walking down a street and somebody spits within my path or just off from my path, I just think, ‘Ew. Like really?’’
Guilt	P5	‘I just get like a guilt . . . a little bit of embarrassment too [when reflecting on a moral transgression]’.
Elevation	P3	‘Joy that someone’s actually benefitting from [donations to charity]’.
Reasons as emotion	P4	When asked how they felt about an illegal moral transgression: ‘I feel like that if I know that that’s happening again, I’ll call the police on them’.

Subtheme: reasons as emotion

When prompted to share their emotional responses to morally salient incidents, five participants sometimes adduced reasons instead.

Theme: morality as care/harm or fairness/reciprocity

Authority/respect was sometimes viewed as morally salient by four participants only if it was related to care/harm or fairness/reciprocity. In-group/loyalty was cast as trumped by care/harm or fairness/reciprocity by two participants. Five participants described examples of purity/sanctity as morally salient only when it was harmful or unfair. See Table 9 for examples and quotes in support of relevant themes and subthemes.

Table 9.

Examples of morality resolving to concerns regarding care/harm or fairness/reciprocity from interviews with autistic adults.

Theme	Participant	Example
Authority/respect	P6	‘That employee . . . steals from the employer, sabotages something . . . They’re not being fair to the employer then’.
Authority/respect	P4	‘Those laws are in place to protect the animals’.
In-group/loyalty	P6	‘There were also Nazi defectors. They were being disloyal. But they were being moral, I would say’.
Purity/sanctity	P6	‘There’s been lots of instances recently of people being put in cages . . . You know, that’s a violation of their basic human dignity. But to me that falls under fairness’.
	P3	‘I don’t think I’d consider it morally wrong [to urinate in a public swimming pool] in and of itself’, but by ‘just making people uncomfortable’.

Discussion

This study was conducted as an initial investigation into the salience of aspects of moral foundations theory in autistic moral thinking. We also sought to elucidate the degree to which emotions contributed to moral judgements in this population. We interviewed six autistic adults using the critical incidents technique (Flanagan, 1954) and analysed the interviews using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).

The autistic adults in our study endorsed all five moral foundations (Haidt, 2012) as morally relevant. Our sample consisted primarily of adults who identified as politically left wing. It is therefore not surprising that many participants described that some transgressions against the authority/respect, in-group/loyalty and purity/sanctity foundations were only morally wrong if they caused harm or were unfair (Koleva et al., 2012). However, it is also possible that the reduction of these three foundations to care/harm or fairness/reciprocity by some participants could be related to autistic moral psychology. Almost all incidents that were offered without probing for specific foundations yielded examples of transgressions against the care/harm and fairness/reciprocity domains. These findings suggest that the two domains are particularly salient among the politically left-leaning autistic adults we interviewed.

Emotions from each category of Haidt’s (2003) theorized moral emotions were represented in our analysis, that is, emotions related to (1) judgement of wrongdoers, (2) judging oneself, (3) responses to victims and (4) responses to moral exemplars. Despite this, explanations were sometimes offered in lieu of emotional responses. This style of responding might be attributable to alexithymia in our sample, a condition common among autistic individuals (40%–50%; Hill et al., 2004). It could be that the autistic adults in this study experienced more moral emotions during the interviews than were reported, but that they were either unaware of or unable to report on their emotions although we could not test this possibility with the available data. It is also possible that a comparable study among neurotypical adults would similarly demonstrate that reasons are sometimes cited rather than emotions when people are asked how moral transgressions make them feel. Further complicating the relation of emotional reactions to moral situations in our study is the finding that autistic individuals may rate their own emotional states differently from ratings given by third-party observers (Johnson et al., 2009). Future research should assess autistic emotional responding to moral stimuli using objective measures of emotional arousal such as heart and respiratory rates, galvanic skin conductance and facial expressions in larger groups of individuals.

In summary, we used qualitative methods to offer a preliminary view of the representation of moral foundations theory in autistic moral reasoning. Our findings suggest that the five moral foundations proposed by Haidt (2012) are considered morally relevant by the autistic adults we interviewed. The care/harm and fairness/reciprocity foundations were most salient among this sample, evidenced by the relatively high rates of unprompted examples reflecting these foundations and by the fact that transgressions in other foundations were sometimes considered morally wrong only if they caused harm or were unfair. Future studies should use quantitative methods to study the relative salience of the five foundations among autistic and neurotypical individuals to investigate more deeply the differences and similarities between the groups. Understanding such differences could contribute alternative perspectives on moral thinking that could be of value to society, for instance, consideration of the moral salience of caring for the climate and the emotional well-being of animals. Such studies could also apply objective measures of emotional arousal to assess the degree to which pathways to moral judgement might differ between autistic and neurotypical individuals. Understanding autistic moral thinking from the strengths-based perspective afforded by the pluralism of moral foundations theory could afford researchers and the broader population a deeper understanding of the social cognitive profile of autistic thinking.

Supplemental Material

supplementary_material – Supplemental material for Moral foundations theory in autism spectrum disorder: A qualitative investigation

Supplemental material, supplementary_material for Moral foundations theory in autism spectrum disorder: A qualitative investigation by Erin E Dempsey, Chris Moore, Annie E Richard and Isabel M Smith in Autism

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: I.M.S. was supported by the Joan & Jack Craig Chair in Autism Research. E.E.D. was supported by the Jean Pettifor and Dick Pettifor Scholarship Fund and the Canadian Psychological Association Grant for Student Research.

ORCID iDs

Erin E Dempsey

Isabel M Smith

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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