Autistic People Do Enhance Their Selves
This publication is included in the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. one author of this publication is identified as autistic in the project.
About the autistic author markerGernsbacher, M. A., Stevenson, J. L., & Dern, S. (2019). Autistic People Do Enhance Their Selves. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(5), 605-615. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619865057
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Authors
Abstract
We investigated whether autistic people are less prone to self-enhance (i.e., portray themselves in socially desirable ways). Autistic (N = 130) and non-autistic (N = 130) participants first responded to social desirability items using the standard instruction to endorse each item as true or false about themselves. Then, all participants read an explanation of what social desirability items measure before responding again to the social desirability items. Self-enhancement was operationalized as participants endorsing more social desirability items before learning the explanation than after. All participants endorsed significantly more social desirability items before learning the explanation than after, F subjects (1, 258) = 57.73, p <.001, [Formula: see text] =.183; F items (1, 34) = 43.04, p <.001, [Formula: see text] =.559). However, autistic and non-autistic participants did not significantly differ in how many items they endorsed, either before or after reading the explanation, indicating that autistic people are as susceptible to social desirability and self-enhancement as non-autistic people are. Our results challenge the claim that autistic people are immune to reputation management.
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These indicators describe the bibliography cited by this publication. An author name is counted each time it appears in one cited reference, so the same person can be counted more than once. Names not yet linked to an author already present in AutiHub are treated as unknown, not as non-autistic. Last computed: 2 Oct 2026 01:01.
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