Social Evaluation of Neurotype-Dependent Media Contents in Autistic and Non-Autistic Adults

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Background: Media is central in shaping social evaluations of different human groups. Despite prevailing media portrayals harboring detrimental stereotypes of autism, autistic people actively use media as an accessible space for connection, advocacy, and community. Autistic people tend to resonate more with autistic peers, whereas non-autistic people form less favorable impressions of autistic people. No study has directly examined autistic and non-autistic people’s social evaluations of media content produced by autistic people or about autistic lived experiences. Here, we examined neurotype-dependent social evaluation using a novel, ecologically valid task. Methods: We compiled autistic-content and non-autistic-content videos from publicly available interviews, vlogs, reality TV, and documentaries. An advisory board of five autistic members vetted the clips. We presented these videos to 73 autistic and 223 non-autistic adults recruited from Prolific. Participants rated and interpreted the videos on three dimensions of social evaluation: connectedness (relatedness, identification), content clarity (understanding of the video), and valanced judgments (enjoyment, discomfort, friendliness, awkwardness). We used mixed factorial analysis of variance to examine differences in ratings by video conditions and participant neurotypes. We examined participants’ video interpretations using reflexive thematic and content analyses, complemented by a generalized linear mixed model to compare group differences quantitatively. Results: Autistic and non-autistic adults reported greater relatedness, identification, and understanding of video contents matching their own neurotypes. Autistic adults also reported greater enjoyment and friendliness of autistic-content videos than non-autistic-content videos. Open-text interpretations showed neurotype-dependent patterns: non-autistic adults evaluated autistic-content videos more negatively, while both groups related more to neurotype-matched videos and expressed non-relatedness to mismatched ones. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of recognizing neurotype-associated differences in evaluating and interpreting media. These differences may arise from divergent social expectations and experiences. They also suggest online spaces may support autistic sociality and well-being.

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