How good are autistic people at social relationships?
9
530Ṁ158
resolved Aug 10
Resolved
-0.14

Background

I have been collecting data on a test where I ask people to rate their social relationships. Each social relationship is rated on a scale from 1-9, across five facets of "helping with tasks", "keeping contact", "sharing knowledge", "sharing resources" and "sharing opportunities and connections", with people being informed that 1 means no function at all and 9 means like a hivemind.

I have asked people to rate four different types of social relationships across the above criteria: family, friends, coworkers and romantic partners. To ensure comparability of scores, I filtered people for having a job and a romantic partner. There are various ways to obtain "overall scores" from this data, but for the purposes of this market I will just do a simple average.

I feel like logically speaking of the concept of "social intelligence" or "social skills" is "real", then it should have a big effect on average social performance. So long-term, I hope that this average score can be treated as some sort of "social general intelligence factor" (at least if one finds some way of adjusting for environmental factors).

Autistic people are typically considered worse at social stuff than allistic people, so to investigate the extent to which this is reflected in social performance, I am about to recruit a sample of autistic people for my study. I tried to balance the sample so about half were diagnosed in childhood and about half were diagnosed in adulthood. I also balanced the sample by gender.

Resolution criterion

I will compute the social performance scores for the allistic sample and for the autistic sample, and then compute Cohen's d (that is, group difference / within-group standard deviation), with negative numbers indicating that autistic people perform worse socially, and positive numbers indicating that autistic people perform better socially.

If the Cohen's d is in the [-3, 3] range, this market resolves to that Cohen's d. If the Cohen's d is less than -3, it resolves to -3. If the Cohen's d is greater than 3, it resolves to 3.

If it is discovered that there is some bias that leads to misestimating the autistic people's social performance (e.g. high support needs autistic people are maybe not answering internet surveys? e.g. autistic people might be marginalized and so have lower expectations for social relationships, making my crude social functioning measure overestimate their functioning?), this market will resolve to the misestimate, rather than attempting to adjust for it.

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