5 ms·

The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be a

The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
Most likely, both my sons qualify as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They were never formally diagnosed and I used to routinely give advice to parents whose children did have a formal diagnosis when I was involved with an educational organization. Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.) My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids. I know quite a lot about autism and related issues. My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with. Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.
- terminalcommand 7y ago
  I think this is very true. I also had a lot of social communication issues growing up and still do. Not receiving special treatment and trying hard to conform with others improved my social skills a lot. Social skills can definitely be learned. You can learn to make eye contact even if it hurts a lot, you can learn to attentively listen and nod. But I think the greatest help in my social skills was watching a lot of TV shows (especially sit-coms). Many make fun of socially awkard situations, word plays, misunderstandings taken to the extreme teaches you social interaction by example and it's fun :).
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    FWIW, pulling my sons from public school so they weren't forced to deal with a ton of really unpleasant social interaction daily helped them seem a lot more "normal." We've arranged our lives to be fairly quiet and so forth to accommodate sensory issues and also addressed underlying health issues to reduce sensory issues. I often forget how difficult they can be and how impaired they are. Then we end up for some odd reason at a crowded restaurant and my oldest son is climbing the walls and I remember that this used to be a routine thing and the more he is subjected to it, the more difficult he is to deal with -- and understandably so because he's extremely stressed. Anyone who knows anything about ASD usually asks me sooner or later if he is autistic. The fact that he's not normal isn't anything subtle at all. He still does not "blend" with normal society. But he's a lot more functional than I ever expected him to be and he nursed me back to health after doctors basically wrote me off for dead, so I certainly don't see him as incompetent. He will probably never hold a "normal" job and there are lots of people who don't have "normal" jobs. I don't see why we can't have more emphasis in this world on helping people find their niche instead of on trying to force fit square pegs to round holes and pretending there are no square holes out there. Square holes exist. We just have this very broken idea that because someone is ill suited to X they are simply bad and terrible and incompetent people who cannot be fixed. This has not been my experience and I also think the world has changed a whole lot. My parents also like things quiet and like having control over their environment. No one has ever suggested there was something wrong with them because of it. My dad grew up on a farm. My mother worked in the fields as a teen and got paid in kind in post-WW2 Germany where the economy was so very bad (meaning if she helped harvest cherries, she came home with a bushel of cherries to help feed the family). Historically, farms were much quieter than modern life and most people lived and/or worked on them. The world changed in a way such that it's much noisier and busier and people have much less latitude for arranging their lives as they see fit, but instead of recognizing that, we just give all the children who don't like that a label and claim they are broken. I'm very skeptical of that explanation -- that we just suddenly and mysteriously have tons and tons of bad apple children for no apparent reason. (Because if you suggest they are medically impaired from a toxic world full of chemicals that didn't exist a hundred years ago, now you are an illogical conspiracy theory nutter. So we don't have an official explanation for why these kids deserve to be called disabled.)
skissane 7y ago
> The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind Well, that claim is frequently made, but not everyone agrees that it has been sufficiently demonstrated. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/
simonskoog 7y ago
After having interacted with a person with autism daily for a few years (and parts of their social groups which include others with autism) I wonder if there's any truth to that at all. It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed. If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?
- hoseja 7y ago
  Yes, it's accurate to a degree of being almost uncomputable. Most people instead have simplified, efficient, stereotype-based heuristic models of others.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  Yeah, I think the problem (if you permit me to label it so) is often less with recognising emotions, and more with diagnosing why someone has that emotion. In the given example, it may be apparent to the child that mum is angry/annoyed. But they are likely to be confused as to why. (which is where DoreenMichele's point about educating the parents comes in - if they can clearly articulate how they feel and why in a given situation, then the autistic child is likely to be able to learn and remember this, even if it might take them a few repetitions of the situation for it sink it (like anyone learning anything that isn't intuitive to them))
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I'm absolutely not aspie. I sometimes get accused of being such. It's always because I'm saying "The emperor has no clothes!" and people don't like it and want to shut me up and pretend I have no social skills whatsoever (to try to create plausible deniability for their crap). I spent a lot of time in therapy. I've learned to keep more quiet about things that seem obvious to me because I do at times miss the fact that what is obvious to me is something someone else thinks they are very cleverly hiding or some crap. Like anyone, I have something of a tendency to assume that what is obvious to me is obvious to others. An awful lot of so-called social skill appears to be knowing what polite lies you are supposed to collude with to make the people around you comfortable. This is actually the root cause of the persistence of a lot of social ills. If you can't tell someone "Yeah, that's racist/classist/sexist baloney, give me a break" because that's too rude to tolerate, don't be all shocked when the world is overrun with racism, classism, sexism, etc. Abusive people also count on normalizing their ugly behaviors and on people around them not saying "No, dude, that's not funny at all. Stop that." We have movie scenes where some child is hiding from a visiting aunt and her icky slobbery kisses and tendency to pinch his cheeks hard and the parents giggle about the behavior of the child rather than tell the aunt "Bitch, keep your hands to yourself. No, you don't have a right to do this to my child. They don't like it, so don't do it." And then we are all mystified at how to stop child molesters. But you can't tell people "Um, yeah. You are actively colluding with child molesters when you do stuff like that." Because that would be rude. Or something.
chownie 7y ago
I don't believe this to be the case, I don't think autistic people as a rule lack theory of mind. I think autistic people lack the model to link desires to actions and so have a maladapted or vague theory of mind instead. If I'm with people who's emotional responses I've learned, I can understand somewhat their desires and intentions are. I've found listening to their breathing gives me a big head start on understanding their current wellbeing and I go from there. With strangers and in scenarios where the communication protocol changes then it becomes enough of a task to decode the emotional exchanges happening that I'm sure I'd fail a test for theory of mind. I can't read what strangers want, I know that they do have intentions and desires but I can't map them until I understand that person's emotional language. There's a definite distinction between lacking a theory of mind entirely and not having the tools available to build a reliable one. I think a lot of autistic people have a rudimentary theory of mind but understand desires and intentions perfectly when told explicitly ahead of time.
timwaagh 7y ago
If you put in 'some' or even 'most' you might be right. Not saying I agree but it's theoretically possible. But it's too deep a theory to fit all cases of such a broad category because it is not consistent with diagnostic criteria. I for example definitely have a theory of mind. But my diagnosis merely says that I do not have the same level of social success as others of my level of general development. And that's absolutely correct.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Most likely, both my sons qualify as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They were never formally diagnosed and I used to routinely give advice to parents whose children did have a formal diagnosis when I was involved with an educational organization. Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.) My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids. I know quite a lot about autism and related issues. My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with. Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.

terminalcommand 7y ago
I think this is very true. I also had a lot of social communication issues growing up and still do. Not receiving special treatment and trying hard to conform with others improved my social skills a lot. Social skills can definitely be learned. You can learn to make eye contact even if it hurts a lot, you can learn to attentively listen and nod. But I think the greatest help in my social skills was watching a lot of TV shows (especially sit-coms). Many make fun of socially awkard situations, word plays, misunderstandings taken to the extreme teaches you social interaction by example and it's fun :).
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  FWIW, pulling my sons from public school so they weren't forced to deal with a ton of really unpleasant social interaction daily helped them seem a lot more "normal." We've arranged our lives to be fairly quiet and so forth to accommodate sensory issues and also addressed underlying health issues to reduce sensory issues. I often forget how difficult they can be and how impaired they are. Then we end up for some odd reason at a crowded restaurant and my oldest son is climbing the walls and I remember that this used to be a routine thing and the more he is subjected to it, the more difficult he is to deal with -- and understandably so because he's extremely stressed. Anyone who knows anything about ASD usually asks me sooner or later if he is autistic. The fact that he's not normal isn't anything subtle at all. He still does not "blend" with normal society. But he's a lot more functional than I ever expected him to be and he nursed me back to health after doctors basically wrote me off for dead, so I certainly don't see him as incompetent. He will probably never hold a "normal" job and there are lots of people who don't have "normal" jobs. I don't see why we can't have more emphasis in this world on helping people find their niche instead of on trying to force fit square pegs to round holes and pretending there are no square holes out there. Square holes exist. We just have this very broken idea that because someone is ill suited to X they are simply bad and terrible and incompetent people who cannot be fixed. This has not been my experience and I also think the world has changed a whole lot. My parents also like things quiet and like having control over their environment. No one has ever suggested there was something wrong with them because of it. My dad grew up on a farm. My mother worked in the fields as a teen and got paid in kind in post-WW2 Germany where the economy was so very bad (meaning if she helped harvest cherries, she came home with a bushel of cherries to help feed the family). Historically, farms were much quieter than modern life and most people lived and/or worked on them. The world changed in a way such that it's much noisier and busier and people have much less latitude for arranging their lives as they see fit, but instead of recognizing that, we just give all the children who don't like that a label and claim they are broken. I'm very skeptical of that explanation -- that we just suddenly and mysteriously have tons and tons of bad apple children for no apparent reason. (Because if you suggest they are medically impaired from a toxic world full of chemicals that didn't exist a hundred years ago, now you are an illogical conspiracy theory nutter. So we don't have an official explanation for why these kids deserve to be called disabled.)

skissane 7y ago

> The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind Well, that claim is frequently made, but not everyone agrees that it has been sufficiently demonstrated. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/

simonskoog 7y ago

After having interacted with a person with autism daily for a few years (and parts of their social groups which include others with autism) I wonder if there's any truth to that at all. It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed. If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?

hoseja 7y ago
Yes, it's accurate to a degree of being almost uncomputable. Most people instead have simplified, efficient, stereotype-based heuristic models of others.
nicoburns 7y ago
Yeah, I think the problem (if you permit me to label it so) is often less with recognising emotions, and more with diagnosing why someone has that emotion. In the given example, it may be apparent to the child that mum is angry/annoyed. But they are likely to be confused as to why. (which is where DoreenMichele's point about educating the parents comes in - if they can clearly articulate how they feel and why in a given situation, then the autistic child is likely to be able to learn and remember this, even if it might take them a few repetitions of the situation for it sink it (like anyone learning anything that isn't intuitive to them))
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I'm absolutely not aspie. I sometimes get accused of being such. It's always because I'm saying "The emperor has no clothes!" and people don't like it and want to shut me up and pretend I have no social skills whatsoever (to try to create plausible deniability for their crap). I spent a lot of time in therapy. I've learned to keep more quiet about things that seem obvious to me because I do at times miss the fact that what is obvious to me is something someone else thinks they are very cleverly hiding or some crap. Like anyone, I have something of a tendency to assume that what is obvious to me is obvious to others. An awful lot of so-called social skill appears to be knowing what polite lies you are supposed to collude with to make the people around you comfortable. This is actually the root cause of the persistence of a lot of social ills. If you can't tell someone "Yeah, that's racist/classist/sexist baloney, give me a break" because that's too rude to tolerate, don't be all shocked when the world is overrun with racism, classism, sexism, etc. Abusive people also count on normalizing their ugly behaviors and on people around them not saying "No, dude, that's not funny at all. Stop that." We have movie scenes where some child is hiding from a visiting aunt and her icky slobbery kisses and tendency to pinch his cheeks hard and the parents giggle about the behavior of the child rather than tell the aunt "Bitch, keep your hands to yourself. No, you don't have a right to do this to my child. They don't like it, so don't do it." And then we are all mystified at how to stop child molesters. But you can't tell people "Um, yeah. You are actively colluding with child molesters when you do stuff like that." Because that would be rude. Or something.

chownie 7y ago

I don't believe this to be the case, I don't think autistic people as a rule lack theory of mind. I think autistic people lack the model to link desires to actions and so have a maladapted or vague theory of mind instead. If I'm with people who's emotional responses I've learned, I can understand somewhat their desires and intentions are. I've found listening to their breathing gives me a big head start on understanding their current wellbeing and I go from there. With strangers and in scenarios where the communication protocol changes then it becomes enough of a task to decode the emotional exchanges happening that I'm sure I'd fail a test for theory of mind. I can't read what strangers want, I know that they do have intentions and desires but I can't map them until I understand that person's emotional language. There's a definite distinction between lacking a theory of mind entirely and not having the tools available to build a reliable one. I think a lot of autistic people have a rudimentary theory of mind but understand desires and intentions perfectly when told explicitly ahead of time.

timwaagh 7y ago

If you put in 'some' or even 'most' you might be right. Not saying I agree but it's theoretically possible. But it's too deep a theory to fit all cases of such a broad category because it is not consistent with diagnostic criteria. I for example definitely have a theory of mind. But my diagnosis merely says that I do not have the same level of social success as others of my level of general development. And that's absolutely correct.