Science

That's an interesting line of thought. A fair number of the things we see around us that we end up hating are the results of people, for whatever reason, adjusting their behavior to be more in line with other people and social pressures, like professional, peer, parental, etc.

Bystander effect is a great example, you don't have to get involved if nobody else is, you have safety in numbers. You're adapting to be more like the rest of your community.

Anyways though, people with autism struggle with that whole adaptation thing, which is often seen as a harmful mal-adaptation.

Is it really though? Is people's herd behavior really all that great? Maybe one of the reasons we kinda mistreat these people is they sometimes seem free of something we wish we could be free of.

It makes sense because people on the spectrum can have injustice sensitivity and difficulties with social norms. It makes sense that they ignore the bystander effect because it’s something similar to a combination of ignoring the social norm of doing nothing because everybody else is doing nothing and trying to stop the injustice of something bad from happening.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

"Our study shows that to the extent that they would act if they saw something wrong, employees with autism were much more likely to intervene, regardless of the number of people present.

And in situations where they would not intervene, they were more likely to identify the influence of others as the reason, whereas neurotypical employees were more reluctant to acknowledge this," says lead author Lorne Hartman, an instructor with the Schulich School of Business.

Lorne has a background in clinical psychology and his main area of research looks at unethical behaviour in organizations.

"But most importantly, in all of these cases, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people who may not have actually been involved in the wrongdoing, but they should have been aware that it was going on," he says, summarizing his earlier research.

The study was published this week in the October issue of Autism Research and created with collaborators from the University of Toronto.

The research participants -- employed individuals, 33 with autism and 34 neurotypical -- were asked to weigh in on hypothetical scenarios involving everything from inefficiencies to inequalities to quality concerns.

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