The Impact of Autism Affirming and Stigmatizing Situations on Autistic Adults' Camouflage Intent

Background: Camouflaging is a strategy widely used by autistic people to mask or conceal their autistic characteristics and behaviors. Given that camouflaging has been associated with a variety of adverse mental health outcomes, reducing the need to camouflage could be effective in improving autistic people’s well-being. In this study, we tested if camouflaging is situation-dependent such that autistic people engage in less camouflaging in situations containing autism-affirming social cues compared to those with autism-stigmatizing cues. Method: Using the Highly-Repeated Within-Person design, we tracked 135 autistic adults’ reports of camouflage intent across 24 hypothetical situations of two types: autism-affirming and autism-stigmatizing. We also measured participants’ strength of identification with the autistic community. Results: Participants reported significantly less camouflage intent in autism-affirming (vs. autism-stigmatizing) situations, and camouflage intent changes were greater for those who more strongly identified with the autistic community. In addition, multilevel modeling indicated that, even after taking participants’ strength of identification with the autistic community into account, there were substantial individual-to-individual differences in the extent to which autism-affirming (vs. stigmatizing) situations reduced camouflage intent. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that autism-affirming situations reduce autistic adults’ intention to camouflage their autistic behaviors, highlighting the importance of designing and implementing inclusionary environments that are neurodiversity-affirming and that promote autistic identity-safe spaces. Just as importantly, we found that the magnitude of the impact of situation type on camouflage intent is substantially different from person to person. Such findings, reflective of the wide diversity that exists within the autistic adult population, warn us against “one-size-fits-all” approaches and invite us to continue to explore the nature of these individual differences across autistic adults.