Chowdhury, Ishita;
(2023)
Spotting lies and reading minds: development of mentalizing and deception in autistic and non-autistic individuals.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Deception is ever-present in day-to-day life. One cognitive process underlying deception, which has been observed to evolve throughout development, is mentalizing i.e. the ability to attribute mental-states to others. Autistic individuals have been found to struggle with mentalizing even in adulthood, so it is possible that they show difficulties in detecting deception as well. The main aims of this PhD were to investigate how mentalizing and deception develop in autistic and non-autistic individuals from pre-adolescence to early adulthood, and to investigate other factors that may affect deception judgement, specifically intergroup bias. In my first study, I collected deception stimuli for two novel deception detection tasks, and investigated if mentalizing ability and autistic traits in a non-autistic sample were related to how successful one is at deceiving. I found that, contrary to expectations, deception production success did not correlate with either mentalizing or autistic traits. For my second study, I tested 11-30 years old autistic and non-autistic participants, using a well-established detection paradigm as well as two novel deception detection tasks, and found that autistic individuals were weaker at detecting deception than non-autistic individuals. While both mentalizing and deception detection abilities improved with age in non-autistic individuals, neither were affected by age in autistic individuals. Furthermore, deception detection was found to predict peer-victimization, and through peer-victimization effect psychological distress. For my final study, I investigated neurotype-based intergroup bias in the context of deception and found that, instead of better deception detection for the in-group (vs out-group) that was expected, both autistic and non-autistic adults were better at detecting deception from other autistic adults. I discuss the theoretical implications of these finding in terms of our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of deception, the implications this has for autistic individuals’ quality of life, and future avenues for deception and autism research.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Spotting lies and reading minds: development of mentalizing and deception in autistic and non-autistic individuals |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10167469 |
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