De-gendering and dehumanization in mental representations of autistic men's and women's facial appearance.

Mental representations of autistic people’s character (i.e., what they are like) are often negative and even dehumanizing. Yet the potential role of gender in shaping such mental representations has rarely been considered, a pattern mirroring the dearth of autism research on autistic women. Using a reverse-correlation image-classification technique, we tested whether dehumanization is evident in visualizations of autistic (vs. neurotypical) men’s and women’s facial appearance (i.e., what they look like) generated by non-autistic university students from the United States (N = 527). Results revealed that facial images of autistic men and women were mechanistically and animalistically dehumanized, but were not infantilized, more than facial images of neurotypical men and women (according to independent raters with no knowledge about whom the images depicted: N = 573), even for images generated by participants who explicitly disavowed such dehumanization. Visualizations of autistic men’s (women’s) faces were also ascribed fewer conventionally masculine (feminine) traits than neurotypical men’s (women’s) faces, and this de-gendering helped explain their greater dehumanization.