Divergent contributions of autistic traits to social psychological knowledge

We examined Gollwitzer et al.’s (1) study on autism and better social psychological knowledge with interest, given its large samples and open dataset. We commend the authors for raising the bar for autism research, which is typically underpowered and rarely draws on social psychology. Notably, their research follows recent investigations of autism-related strengths, and findings that certain social processes (e.g., social motivation) are unimpaired in autistic people who compensate for their social difficulties (2⇓–4). Gollwitzer et al.’s article, together with recent research, is a move toward greater appreciation for autism and neurodiversity in society (5).Notwithstanding our enthusiasm for the research, we are surprised that a positive relationship between an autism trait questionnaire and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: p.shah{at}bath.ac.uk. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1