Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind

Re:Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack... by bravura on Sunday February 04, 2024 @02:46PM (#39253658)

"Secondly, in my experience and others I've read - autistic individuals seem to often do much better at understanding each other. I mean this in two ways: autists are often better at understanding other autists than they are at understanding neurotypicals, but also in many cases autists may be better at understanding other autists than neurotypicals are at understanding autists."

This is an interesting point.

"With this framing you could just as well say neurotypicals lack a theory of mind. Largely we don't do that because there are more neurotypicals than autists."

I think the really interesting result would result from testing this.

i.e. because of prior knowledge, neurotypicals model the default person as neurotypical.

However, knowing whether the second party is neurotypical or autistic, can a neurotypical person model their second party's mental states better than an autist, or worse?

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Re:Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack... by munificent on Sunday February 04, 2024 @04:07PM (#39254492)

> However, knowing whether the second party is neurotypical or autistic, can a neurotypical person model their second party's mental states better than an autist, or worse?

Even this is still limited by the neurotypical person's prior experience with autistic people and recognizing them as such.

All of this really reduces down to "it's hard to understand people whose brains work different from yours or from others' that you have significant experience with."

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Re:Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack... by Geisterde on Sunday February 04, 2024 @05:00PM (#39254954)

I also found that post very interesting. I would also make a point (vapid as it may be) that autism is a spectrum. Many people over the years have called me autistic, and I for sure have a few too many autistic family members for it to be a fluke. Somehow though, in person I have a solid skill at teaching people technical information at a level they can understand it, I am quick to identify what types of analogies they will understand and my technical knowledge is generally broad enough to relate it. If you saw me at work you would probably consider me -a hard worker -a dirtbag -adept -foolish, whatever it is, but likely not autistic; if you got to know me, you would probably be suspicious. 2 sibblings are in a similar category but more advanced autism, 1 undiagnosed, they are perfectly capable of reasoning about their own/others cognition.

It makes me suspicious though, if I was more defensive then I wouldnt go around saying I might be mildly autistic. If that other me were surveyed, would I unwittingly bias the results?

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Re:Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack... by _a_a_a_ on Sunday February 04, 2024 @07:03PM (#39255834)

> Somehow though, in person I have a solid skill at teaching people technical information at a level they can understand it, I am quick to identify what types of analogies they will understand

That's interesting. There's something odd about me but I don't know what, I'm not like other people and they tend to consider me a bit weird (usually in a nice way). In turn, I often can't understand them. That said, what I just quoted above of yours pretty much describes me. I'm extremely good at putting myself in another person's boots for teaching technical subjects, and indeed I'm not too shabby at the social side of things - I'm often surprised at people's faux pas. And yet, people's behaviour regularly baffles me too. It's like I'm picking up a lot of some things but perhaps too little of another.

I did an online test for autism, expected to come out below average but much to my surprise came out above.

> you would probably consider me -a hard worker -a dirtbag -adept -foolish

Looks a bit like you're passing CLI arguments :-)

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Re:Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack... by Doxin on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @09:44AM (#39274707)

> I would also make a point (vapid as it may be) that autism is a spectrum

I don't think that's a vapid point at all. It is however a widely misunderstood statement. Autism being a spectrum does not mean "you can have it a little, or a lot, or in-between". It means you can have any one of the symptoms a little or a lot or in between, individually.

Among other things this means being good socially does not trivially preclude autism.

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