Exploring lie frequency and emotional experiences of deceptive decision-making in autistic adults https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613251315892
"Fifty-eight non-autistic and fifty-six autistic university students matched on age and gender completed self-report measures of their general lying patterns, how often they lied in the past 24 hours, and whether they would lie across hypothetical scenarios with differing beneficiaries (self, other, group) and motivations (protective, beneficial)."
Results: "The groups did not significantly differ in their general lying behaviour or frequency of lies told over 24 hours."
Another sweeping generalisation about autism peels away. Unless they were lying?
Also: "Future research may benefit from examining autistic deception across numerous social situations as more general lie frequency measures may be insensitive to nuanced population differences."
I'm not sure about the term 'autistic deception' because I don't think deception comes particularly easily to many people with autism, particularly children. I know some would have us believe that 'masking' and 'camouflaging' are widespread across autism, but as per Fombonne's excellent article on that topic: "Because of its association with intended deception, the term camouflage has poor fit with the autism world" https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.13296
Indeed, I'm inclined to believe that the ability to lie - which is quite an important cognitive feat - is probably one of a number of important parameters to suggest that autism as a diagnosis for some is not a static entity. And indeed, for an even smaller some, may not be a lifelong persisting entity based on this and other skills acquisitions...
