Not worth it: procedural fairness and autistic withdrawal from competition

In the lab, competition seems to suit autistic people quite well. Put autistic children next to a competitor and they do better, just like everyone else. ¹ Turn a standard false-belief test into a contest with a prize, and the number of autistic children who pass jumps from 13 per cent to 74. ² Give autistic adults a purely strategic numbers game against other players, and on the best-known version of it they hold their own. ³

Outside the lab, it’s a different story. Autistic adults are thin on the ground wherever adult life is openly competitive - anything ranked, anything rivalrous, anything where the winner takes most. Where anyone has counted, mostly in sport, we’re well behind. ⁴

Those two things don’t fit together. And the easy explanation, that we just don’t have the competitive drive, is the one the lab rules out.

So what are we actually saying no to?

1 The belief I had to let go of

I started out sure that autistic people are simply less competitive. It’s a common belief, inside the autistic community as much as outside it, and I believed it too. It’s easy to find support for. We’re less present in sport. We’re less present in the parts of working life that run on ranking and rivalry. A lot of male social life is built around competition, either playing it or talking about it, and a lot of autistic men are visibly outside of it.

I had an explanation for it, too, and I was pleased with it. We care unusually about fairness, so we put up with competition when the contest is clean and walk away when it isn’t. Cheating drives us out. So does a rigged field. And - the bit I was surest of - we’d rather not play at all than play something we know we’re going to lose.

Writing that last sentence down next to the others is what broke it.

Those are two different ideas, and they contradict each other. Losing to someone who’s better than you isn’t unfair. It’s about as fair as a contest gets: the rules worked and gave the right answer. “I walk away because the game is rigged” and “I walk away because I’ll lose” are opposite claims, and I’d been carrying them around together for months without noticing.

The second one is also much simpler. A lot of autistic adults have a long history of failing in public, of effort that doesn’t turn into results, and of being visibly bad at things in front of people who found them easy. Pulling out of something you expect to fail at doesn’t need a theory of justice. If the fairness idea is going to stand up, it has to beat that.

So the question gets narrower. When an autistic adult says no to a contest, are they reacting to the odds, or to the rules?

2 “It’s just not worth it”

Most of the data on participation is about sport, because sport is easy to count. It’s also the worst way to answer my question. Sport mixes competition up with physical effort, noise, crowds and coordination, and autistic people have their own reasons to avoid every one of those. So I treat the sport data as the visible edge of something bigger. The kind of competition I actually care about, the kind that happens at a desk, nobody has measured.

A review of physical activity in autistic adults found only twelve studies that qualified, out of 2,834, and they all pointed the same way: autistic adults are unlikely to meet national activity guidelines. ⁴ The most useful recent work is qualitative. McLeod and colleagues interviewed autistic adults in middle age about physical activity, and they did it with a trauma-informed approach - the first study in this area to do so. ⁵ Their participants described places they couldn’t use, sensory overload, and unhelpful support from people outside their close circle, on top of a lot of bad experience earlier in life.

Another study of autistic adults came up with three themes. Support from others matters; it needs to be measurable; and the third is the one I keep coming back to: it’s just not worth it. ⁶

“Not worth it” is a judgement about costs and benefits. It’s what someone says when they’ve already run the numbers.

3 Everything about competition comes from children

This is the awkward part. Almost everything we know about autism and competition itself comes from children. ⁷

O’Flaherty and colleagues followed 313 autistic and 6,346 non-autistic Australian children from age eight to fifteen. ⁸ Non-autistic children got something out of every kind of sport. For autistic children, team sport went with worse mental health and no physical benefit, while individual sport helped their physical quality of life, though not their weight or mental health. The researchers put the difference down to the social and sensory side of team sport.

Yu and colleagues tracked where 26 autistic preschoolers and 20 other children looked during a competitive task. ¹ The autistic children paid less attention to the competition - they looked at it less - but having someone competing alongside them still lifted their performance by as much as everyone else’s. They barely watched the race, and raced anyway.

Peterson and colleagues built a false-belief task where working out what another player believes is how you win a prize, and gave it to the same children as the standard Sally-Anne test. ² Seventy-four per cent passed the competitive version; thirteen per cent passed the standard one. Their reading is that the usual tests give children no reason to bother, and competition supplies one.

Those children grow up to be autistic adults, so I don’t think the findings stop mattering with age. But look at the ages: preschool, primary school, early adolescence. That makes the child data useful in a particular way. It’s a starting point, taken before the years of experience pile on. If the drive to compete is there at five and the participation has collapsed by forty-five, whatever happened in between is the thing worth explaining.

The one adult study of competitive strategy is disputed. Pantelis and Kennedy found that thirty autistic adults did as well as anyone at the “beauty contest” game. ³ Król and Król ran a more detailed version and concluded that autism does limit strategic thinking after all. ⁹ Two studies, opposite conclusions, and nothing settled.

4 The sense of justice we all claim

This is the part I most want to be true.

Almost everyone in the autistic community believes autistic people have a strong sense of justice - we call it veracity. It turns up in community writing, in clinical descriptions, in nearly every popular account of autism, and in what autistic adults say about themselves. I believe it about myself.

As far as I can tell, almost nobody has scientifically tested it.

There’s a good tool for it. Schmitt and colleagues built and validated a questionnaire that measures four kinds of justice sensitivity - as a victim, as an observer, as someone who benefits, and as someone who does the wrong - on 2,510 people. ¹⁰ It’s been around for fifteen years. I can’t find a single study that has given it to autistic people. The question is sitting right there, and so is the tool.

What circulates instead is a claim, repeated across a lot of websites, that autistic children turn down unequal rewards even when it costs them. It’s always credited to a 2021 paper by Shulman, Guberman and Ziv. I can’t find that paper anywhere: no journal, no volume, no DOI, just websites citing each other. ¹¹ I’m not raising it to score a point. A belief this widely held, resting on a citation nobody can produce, is a reason to go and check.

One real study cuts against me, and again it’s in children. Hartley and Fisher found that children with autism shared about as fairly as other children, chose equal splits as often, and talked about “fairness” just as much. But they were 37 per cent less likely to return a fair offer, and 22 per cent less likely to return an unfair one. ¹² They talked about fairness as much as anyone, but responded to it less. That’s close to the opposite of being extra-sensitive to unfairness.

The one study pointing my way looked at the brain. Bolling and colleagues scanned children through two experiences: being left out of a game, and seeing the rules broken. ¹³ When they were left out, some brain areas involved in social pain were less active in the autistic children than in the others, even though both groups said they were just as upset. When the rules were broken, some of the same areas were more active.

Less bothered by being left out, more bothered by the rules being broken. That’s the shape my idea needs. There are two catches, though. Breaking a rule isn’t the same as an unfair outcome; plenty of unfair outcomes break no rules at all. And if the pattern is already there in childhood, nobody knows whether it grows with experience or stays the same, because nobody has run the same study in adults.

5 Learned, or born with it?

The way I’d put the idea now is that autistic adults may need the contest itself to be legitimate before they’ll enter it, where other people mostly need the prize to be worth having. That’s not a new idea about the mind. Research on fairness at work has long separated two questions - was the outcome fair, and was the process fair - and I’m only asking whether autistic adults weigh the second one differently.

It also predicts something the simpler explanations don’t. Say autistic adults avoid sales jobs. That could be because sales is socially demanding. Or it could be because the way territories, targets and credit get handed out is murky. Both explain the avoidance. Only the second predicts that a sales job with fixed, open rules and clear commission would be fine.

There’s plenty that could knock this over. Pulling out of sport is explained several times over before fairness even comes up: the sensory side, coordination, the social side of team sport, being picked on in PE, the effort of getting somewhere at the same time every week. Fairness is the last explanation anyone would reach for there, which is why I don’t think sport is where the answer is.

The strongest objection is that it might be learned. Imagine the sensitivity to rigged contests isn’t something we’re born with at all. Imagine it’s the sensible result of decades of contests that really were rigged. Plenty of autistic adults describe being passed over, shut out of work, and bullied once they’re in it. Someone who has entered contest after contest where the criteria weren’t stated, the judging was social, and the result went against them however well they did, has learned something true about contests. Saying no to the next one is just experience talking. And “it’s just not worth it” is exactly what that sounds like.

Which one it is matters, because they point different ways. If it’s built in, fairer contests should bring autistic people back. If it’s learned, fairer contests won’t be enough on their own, at least not for a long time, because trust takes years to rebuild.

It could also turn out to be about justice-sensitive people in general, who just happen to include a lot of autistic people. The interoception research went through the same thing, when a trait that often comes with autism turned out to be doing much of the work. And it might not be there at all. Sensory load, coordination, the social side and plain fear of failing might explain every bit of it, with fairness adding nothing. That would be worth knowing too.

What I’d most like to see tested is the strangest prediction in all of this. Give someone a game they’re likely to win, and tell them openly that the rules are tilted in their favour. Would an autistic adult walk away from it? Hardly anything else predicts that, so if it happened, it would be hard to explain away.

What I think

If the rules matter this much, then most workplace adjustments for autistic people are missing something. They’re almost all about the senses and communication: lighting, noise, notice of meetings, written instructions, a quiet room. All useful, and all about the room.

Nobody lists fairness of process as an adjustment. But if competing at work depends on it, then publishing the promotion criteria is an autism adjustment. So is a written basis for handing out accounts, a stated rule for who gets the stretch assignment, and a commission structure that doesn’t change after the fact.

I nearly wrote that these changes cost nothing. They don’t. They cost discretion. Vague criteria are often vague on purpose, because vagueness lets a manager reward who they want and explain it afterwards. Written criteria take that away, and they leave a record that someone can point to later. That’s why I don’t expect employers to rush to it. I go into this in more detail in Modernising HR for Variant Minds: Autism.

In the meantime, an autistic adult who knows this about themselves can ask at interview how territories are allocated and how promotion is decided, and treat a vague answer as information. That doesn’t need anyone’s permission.

There’s also a way this could go badly. “Autistic people aren’t suited to competitive roles” is one short step from a screening test, and a screening test is a way of keeping people out with a citation attached. The same evidence could just as easily say “roles with murky rules lose their autistic staff”, which puts the job on the employer. Which way it goes depends on who’s handed the result.

And then there’s the smaller thing, which is the one I actually care about. An autistic adult who’s spent thirty years being called a poor sport, a sore loser, not a team player, oddly intense about rules, or just no fun, has been handed a description of their character. If what they were really doing was turning down contests they’d judged to be crooked - or had learned, rightly, to expect to be crooked - then that description is wrong, and the real reason can be explained in a sentence.

Most of what a psychologist usefully does is tell someone what’s happening to them. Nobody can do that yet for this, because nobody has looked at it in anyone old enough to have been shaped by it.

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