Making Deception Fun: Teaching Autistic Individuals How to PlayFriendly Tricks

Authors

Adel Naj
Megan St. Clair
Kacie Massoudie
Jonathan Tarbox
Lauri Simchoni
Marianne Jackson
Angela Persicke

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2024

Keywords

Autism, Deception, Multiple exemplar training, Perspective taking, Theory of mind, Trick

Abstract

Perspective taking is a critical repertoire for navigating social relationships and consists of a variety of complex verbalskills, including socially adaptive forms of deception. Detecting and being able to use socially adaptive deception likelyhas many practical uses, including defending oneself against bullying, telling white lies to avoid hurting others’ feelings,keeping secrets and bluffing during games, and playing friendly tricks on others. Previous research has documented thatsome Autistic1 children have challenges identifying deception and playfully deceiving others (Reinecke et al., 1997). Thecurrent study employed a multiple baseline across participants design to evaluate the use of multiple exemplar training, rules,modeling, practice, and feedback for teaching four Autistic children and adolescents to use deception to play friendly trickson others. The procedure was successful for all participants, and generalization was achieved across novel, untrained tricks.

Publication Title

Behavior Analysis in Practice

First Page

1

Last Page

13

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40617-024-00935-z

Recommended Citation

Naj, Adel; St. Clair, Megan; Massoudie, Kacie; Tarbox, Jonathan; Simchoni, Lauri; Jackson, Marianne; and Persicke, Angela, "Making Deception Fun: Teaching Autistic Individuals How to PlayFriendly Tricks" (2024). Pepperdine University, Psychology Division Scholarship. Paper 33.
https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/gseppsych/33