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People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds
- 082349872349872 3y agoMy wife recently discovered "Young Sheldon", and one of the most egregious goofs so far is the idea that Sheldon would suffer from stage fright. We both agree that stage fright is something probably only suffered by people who care about the opinions of strangers.
- yreg 3y agoI don't know what's supposed to be the young Sheldon's diagnosis, but social anxiety is more common among autistic people than neurotypical population.
- cassianoleal 3y agoThere are many reasons why stage fright might happen. One that I suspect is very common, is the desire for excellence. Young Sheldon was probably very aware that he's not the best at communicating complex thoughts to a broad audience due to his unique, or atypical world view. He also had a very high bar of personal excellence and would probably feel like a fool if he exposed himself and failed to meet that bar. There is nuance in "caring about the opinions of strangers". He probably didn't care at all when he was happy about his performance - i.e. it was on them to not understand what he was saying after great thought and probably a very carefully crafted delivery. He probably did care how the others felt when he felt like failed himself by not being up to his own standards.
- giantg2 3y agoASD is a spectrum. There are likely some who do not get stage fright, but there are likely many who do.
- Podgajski 3y agoI have Asperger‘s, and my stage fright depends on what I’m doing. I’ve been a lead singer and guitarist in quite a few bands and I’ve never had stage fright while playing. But push me to stand up and talk about something and I will freeze and act like a total spaz.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 3y agoThat depends. Us autists tend to get bullied a lot and picked on for anything and everything we do. Being on a stage means a lot more people see what you do, and what you do wrong, and you'll get a lot more bullying. And if you're also a perfectionist and feel like you've failed over the tiniest mistakes, this can get even worse. I — myself autistic — am close to thirty now and I still suffer from extreme social anxiety and stagefright due to the bullying I experienced in school.
- 082349872349872 3y agothanks all! I stand corrected...
- InSteady 3y ago:)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sundvor 3y agoBeing on a stage is moving into a situation you are not familiar with, and making a performance, which is different to the general opinion of strangers. If you rescue someone, that's all about that person's safety - which has got just about zero to do with getting on a stage and making something all about yourself.
- jmprspret 3y agoI don't know about this. I think things like stage fright can be more nuanced than just caring about other's opinions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- isaacfrond 3y agoPaper is here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aur.3012 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aur.3012 I'll save you the read, in light of the replication crisis, this is the important bit: 33 autistic participants
- NeuroCoder 3y agoThey also say "Because of the relatively small sample size, we did not make corrections for multiple comparisons.". I don't think that means this should be dismissed entirely because you accomplish what you can with the data available to you. It's extremely hard to conduct studies of specialized populations and if we waited for the perfect conditions nothing would get done. We should just be careful not to make any strong opinions based on this study alone.
- lmm 3y ago> They also say "Because of the relatively small sample size, we did not make corrections for multiple comparisons.". Do you think this is somehow a point in their defense? Corrections for multiple comparisons reduce the significance numbers of your results; probably they found that if they corrected for multiple comparisons their p-value was above 0.05 and they wouldn't be able to publish their paper, so they undid it. (Alternatively, they were lazy, so they skipped it).
- NeuroCoder 3y agoI was just adding onto why we should be skeptical. I'm assuming this was published because it's hard to find data like this, not because the results were spectacular
- Yoric 3y agoAnecdotal evidence: around me, several kids are on the autistic spectrum. It's hard to prevent them from intervening when they notice what they feel is an injustice, towards them or others. At some point, this included one of them regularly attempting to rescue babies from baby trolleys, which they considered a prison. Fortunately, the would-be rescuer was only aged 3 at the time.
- Podgajski 3y agoHi, I posted this study because I have Asperger’s and this is what was always said about my behavior. Yesterday I literally had to stop myself from sending photographs to the police of a guy walking his dog off leash in a park that has signs forbidding it. And my reason for wanting to call the police is because of my compassion for the dog or for anyone the dog to hurt. Not so much that it was only that the man was doing something wrong. And I think that’s what gets missed in those of us with ASD, there is still a strong, empathy and compassion that motivates us.
- mtreis86 3y agoI've never had a loose dog try to attack me. Plenty of dogs on leashes have lunged tho. So I treat the leash status as a signal of how much the owner trusts the dog to behave.
- Podgajski 3y agoYour anecdotes are not data. For example. I can count no less than six times when off leash dogs tried to bite me. The most recent one was when two pitbulls and a Labrador charged at me.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoI've never been shot, clearly shootings don't happen.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoNot that I think there’s much credence to this signal as you’ve stated it, but it does have overlap with what I try to convey to people when I ask them to leash their own dog: it’s for the safety of their dog as much as it is for mine. In other words, as I’ve tried to explain it, “even if your dog is perfectly well behaved, you have no idea if my dog or any other you may encounter is a danger to your dog.” This has been universally unconvincing to those dog owners who walk their dogs off leash. They don’t—in my experience—actually care if it puts their dog at risk, any more than they care about putting anyone else at risk. Anecdata still, but my experience tells me that whether a dog is leashed or not is mostly an indicator of whether the dog’s human is more concerned with the dog’s safety, or with their own selfish convenience.
- RecycledEle 3y ago[flagged]
- orwin 3y agoIt's not sociopathy, it's more like 'wtf should I do'. I passed a weird certification in highschool to learn how to deal with injuries and dangerous situations (car crash, someone passing out in public) and so far it helped twice. Each time the other helpers had the same (or similar) training I did. However when I met two people fighting each other in public, violently (blood and teeth), I was under a severe bystander effect I thought I wouldn't have (because I had good reactions to dangerous situations in the past). For me at least, this effect is more about how prepared you are, a sort of default state, not something bad.
- drewcoo 3y ago> It's not sociopathy, it's more like 'wtf should I do'. You're saying the difference is not in action but in intent. I claim you can't truly know someone else's intent. Further, I don't think I'd trust a sociopath (ASPD) to tell me honestly what their intent is/was. So I don't understand the difference from an objective point of view.
- anigbrowl 3y agoHowever when I met two people fighting each other in public, violently (blood and teeth), I was under a severe bystander effect I thought I wouldn't have This is pretty rational actually, since you have no way of knowing who the instigator and who the victim (if any) is. A person who's been attacked for no reason will generally make it obvious, trying to escape or hang on property that's being taken from them or evincing other signs of distress. If you find two people actively going at each other and there isn't an obvious underdog, it's probably best not to intervene physically.
- mrweasel 3y agoFor adults at least there's also the calculation of "What will this cost me?" You will see people with Downs syndrome force themselves between people fighting without considering that they might themselves be hurt, while the rest of us "normies" makes the calculation that there are twenty guys beating up a single person and they could just as easily take you out as well. In professional settings we see people not speak out against obvious violations of proper conduct, ethical behavior and wrong doing out of fear. E.g. I know a nurse who should speak up about any number of violations in her workplace. They aren't serious enough to get someone killed and if she does she'll never work in this part of the country again. So yes, should should do something, but the personal cost is immense. Actually, it does sound a bit sociopathic. Maybe it's just the average person succumbing to a sociopath society.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- incomingpain 3y agoNone of my business what other people think about me. I'll definitely render help as long as I find it possible.
- nyanmatt 3y ago“With autism” A large portion of the autistic community is very against this phrasing. Autism is not a disease you carry, or something you “have”. It should be used as an adjective to describe a person: “Autistic people less likely to succumb to bystander effect” Edit: If you follow through to the actual paper referenced you can see they use the correct phrasing.
- ralusek 3y agoI'm a brown haired person. I'm also a person with brown hair. Neither phrasing makes my brown hair a disease I carry.
- nyanmatt 3y agoThat’s a totally false comparison. Brown hair is something you physically have.
- tgv 3y agoThere's no point in arguing about these interpretations. Some people get convinced that "X with Y" means that X has Y, and since this is used in sentences like "X has cancer," autism is portrayed as a disease. There are other people who oppose the adjectival phrase for similar reasons. IMO, the point in these cases is more that a certain phrase has obtained a negative connotation, and should be avoided, but it is framed in some Sapir-Whorf-like style.
- 3y ago
- cubefox 3y agoThe relevant psychological variable here might be conformity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity There are interesting other connections as well, for example, men have been found to exhibit less conformity than women.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- js8 3y agoThere was a similar article postulating that dissidents (for example from Eastern Europe) are often on the spectrum, for that very reason, if they see injustice, they are vocal about it.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoIf you can, please link to it. I would like to read it. Because a prominent feature of dissidents in the USSR and Putin’s Russia is that they often retreated into private worlds (samizdat literature, organizing cultural events privately in their own flats, writing for their desk drawer) instead of overtly challenging the regime. To the point where such dissidents can be suspicious of those who are vocal: people who actually stand up against the regime are viewed as either fools or as possessing some ulterior motive.
- anonym29 3y agoGo ask American conservatives today how they feel about groups that allege to publicly challenge the uniparty regime here, like "Patriot Front". Every conservative I know views those groups as honeypots for dissidents being operated by the regime itself (FBI, FBI informants etc). They have their own substack and medium feeds that are unshackled by conventional reporting standards and frequently contrast deeply against regime narratives, be they COVID, Ukraine, Jan 6th, etc. They have their own social circles, which they ideologically police to make sure that those holding regime viewpoints are not invited to private social events. The way you've described the culture of dissidence in the USSR and Russia sounds eerily familiar, taking a look at US dissidents today.
- COOL_DUDE_2112 3y ago[flagged]
- COOL_DUDE_2112 3y ago>a prominent feature of dissidents in the USSR and Putin’s Russia is that they often retreated into private worlds (samizdat literature, organizing cultural events privately in their own flats, writing for their desk drawer) instead of overtly challenging the regime. To the point where such dissidents can be suspicious of those who are vocal How times change. I can't speak on places I've never been, but in my homeland I have organized events in my home for folks from Russia and other places. I had a reputation as being a "milquetoast neoliberal" right up until the moment some old comrades saw me standing next to a crowd with my backpack despite always being the one who stood by the door, opening it only if it seemed certain it would be broken down to demand a warrant as folks filed out the back. In modern times, activism seems performative -- lots of people who retweet and reshare things not attached to their real name, while a much smaller number took incredible risks -- financial, social, personal... to change the very architecture of the internet to make resistance more possible. But I didn't bust a window during the G20 or write "ACAB" on my Tinder, so I'm not cool enough for the local collective. It's ok to be VOCAL, as in... go to a protest. But if you do it performative, not with the expectation this is the beginning of a slow suicide... you're a fool. We've got a generation that forgets things like the original members of one of the few true Russian punk bands I've encountered did not speak English, were thrown into a literal gulag, then had the name carried on by another generation as they rotted in the worst types of jail. The "ulterior motive" you mention I oft see is oganized crime... they hate "the state" so they can keep young women (and men) addicted to drugs, pimped out, and, if they get out of line, scooped up by "the state" they claim to hate as they go muck about in so called civil society, stymying progress that would bring about true change such folks could live in harmony rather than scam credit cards and hook folks on overpriced black market drugs that if legalized, would still cause issues, but be more like alcohol in terms of issues created rather than a pathway to white slavery. I've said it before and I'll say it again: to be a dissident is a forever decision, often a form of slow suicide, and no one should be shamed for taking another path, for life is precious and not everyone is suited for this work. (I wasn't. I made bad decisions, and I'm stuck with them.)
- 1letterunixname 3y agoWow, that's interesting. It's curious how the 2 main demographics of individualists: the eusocial leadership group and people with autistic tendencies. There is obviously some spectrum overlap. It's probably unhelpful to automatically reduce people to stereotypes, but it helps to model and understand tendencies and behaviors.
- mrangle 3y agoASD people may be less likely to be affected by any social effect that is mediated by group attention. Even prior to group approval. The Bystander Effect is one example. Being enamoured by famous individuals is another. Fame being defined by the number of eyeballs that is on the object. Down to the guy who garners attention by singing in the local dive bar band, who lectures seniors on medicare coverage at the local assisted care facility, or who reads scripture at church once per month. A negative example would be famous popular criminals. This carries over to social causes and more.
- dang 3y agoRelated ongoing thread: Autism and responding to authority (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072756
- anigbrowl 3y agoA pessimistic corollary to this is that intervention is often followed by social punishment if it impinges on anyone else's interests or even just makes the bystanders look bad.
- user_7832 3y agoI think taking any action makes you stand out, and if no one's doing anything you "conform" by not taking action too.
- wkat4242 3y agoIn other words, peer pressure. But autistic people tend to be much less sensitive to that.
- anigbrowl 3y agoTrue, but that doesn't mean it's enjoyable. In extreme cases it could lead to someone getting fired or falsely reported to the police though luckily that's pretty rare.
- COOL_DUDE_2112 3y ago> A pessimistic corollary to this is that intervention is often followed by social punishment if it impinges on anyone else's interests or even just makes the bystanders look bad. You're not pessimistic, you have depressive realism[1] Real life is not a movie or television show. Much like women complain they don't like the "manic pixie dream girl"[1] trope of films like Garden State[2]... men don't like, or need the "sullen cherub dream boy" trope you see in movies like Perks of Being a Wallflower. To be a dissident is a forever decision and if you stray from the narrow, socially acceptable path of back and forth that brought forth our present... global situation... you will wake up one day trying to remind yourself that while your name is not in Wikipedia or IMDB, at least you had an effect on society, that there are people you cannot name or describe, situations you've been in that... moved the needle in the sense you saved a life, or many of them, in ways hard to articulate or prove. There's an essay I'm struggling to track down that years later, an... let's call her "ex-girlfriend" showed me during my summer in San Francisco post Snowden about the hit Showtime series "Californication"... it talks about how despite being Bukowksi-esque it was actually incredibly feminist, in as much as a sex heavy Showtime series can be... And rather than actually discuss my life, I'll do the autistic thing and give an example from tv/film... on the show, Hank repeatedly connects with "Trixie" -- she doesn't just "do porn -- she's a full on prostitute, and they have... a banter. Much like my ex and I... they keep meeting at parties. Hank, the main character... is in love, and even if he wasn't, he doesn't pay for it... and Trixie is forever being "saved" by Hank -- sometimes from rudeness, sometimes from much worse things. Anyways, when you're autistic, you often meet people who want... a relationship minus the sex. They want to BE the manic pixie dream girl, to embrace life with a dark, brooding intellectual sidekick who can protect them if things go astray. They tend to treat folks like us like a prop, to be discarded when they've gotten their fill (or simply when the summer ends and their "primary" returns), and when they notice this pattern is tipping you towards extremism, they often choose to medicalize the response and blame the victim rather than... call a metaphorical time out and get you out of the cycle of proving oneself smart enough for the good leads. If you're autistic, and not a jerk... you'll wonder if it's worth the predicaments it got you into, worth the gaslights and gunshots and all the things folks have said, running through my head on nights like these, if you don't have some nest egg to fall back on if the shitstorm your not standing by generates lasts too long. Anyways, I apologize for the wall of text but... it's true. We're less likely to stand by, and we're more likely to be ostracized for it. I know I felt unwelcome in many infosec spaces because I did not hide the fact that I wasn't a fair weather feminist, and I didn't like how they would treat folks. People oft conflate autistic and pendantic for a reason -- because they want certain dynamics to persist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism [1] Film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term in 2007... talking about [redacted]'s character, he said "[redacted] embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. [This character] exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."
- nathan_compton 3y agoI have mild autism (not entirely politically correct to describe it that way) without intellectual impairments and I frankly see normal people as disabled.
- solardev 3y ago"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." -George Carlin The future is Wall-E...
- NeuroCoder 3y agoI might be missing something here. What does this have to do with this article concerning ASD and the bystander effect.
- guraf 3y agoThis has nothing to do with the article. He's just showing his poor lack of conversational skills, typical of the condition that makes him "superior".
- Obscurity4340 3y agorelevant
- wkat4242 3y agoI know what you mean. I remember one time I got off the plane in Italy and I was walking with my girlfriend to customs. At one point we branched off from all the other passengers and she was like "hey we're going the wrong way, everyone is heading there". And I said nope this is the EU passengers exit, look at the sign. She couldn't believe it was right because the plane was full of others from our EU country. All those people couldn't be wrong, right? I explained I guessed they were all just dumbly following the herd without looking which wouldn't even occur to me. I don't really have that autopilot herd-following program in me. Even when I'm in a group I'm navigating as if I were alone. So we got to the end and there were 6 free booths in front of us and all the other passengers were queuing up for the 2 unmanned non-EU passport booths :') a security guard had to let them into the right queue. This applies to the bystander effect too. I'm not surprised about this conclusion at all.
- akomtu 3y ago"Autists ignore the herd mentality" in other words.
- NeuroCoder 3y agoI wish the paper put more emphasis on understanding the mechanism driving the outcome than the implications of the outcomes. It's great to discuss the practical utility of findings such as organizational and employment practices (because it's easy to dismiss research otherwise), but remarkably little time is spent actually discussing how their data reflects things like diffusion of responsibility brought up in the introduction.
- graphe 3y ago>The study was published this week in the October issue of Autism Research and created with collaborators from the University of Toronto. The research participants -- employed individuals, 33 with autism and 34 neurotypical -- were asked to weigh in on hypothetical scenarios involving everything from inefficiencies to inequalities to quality concerns. It's a survey of 67 people. Could have been online even. Nothing I'd take seriously.
- dukeyukey 3y agoWhy is a study of 67 people not serious? If their sampling is solid it should be more than enough.
- graphe 3y agoIt's a survey. Ever took one?
- explorigin 3y agoASD is very dynamic. It is not linear spectrum, think of it more like a polar graph. I would think 67 may be enough people to get an idea for one "hallmark" but certainly not all of them as a comprehension.
- samplatt 3y agoMany ASD-related surveys are not confirmed-diagnosed either, but only self-reporting as ASD. I mean I get it, it'd be a colossal pain to verify all that medical data, but it also makes for bad science.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Name_Chawps 3y agoIf you self report as autistic, you're probably autistic. Especially because, in practice, an autistic person is defined as someone who self-reports autistic traits to a health care provider.
- jhaenchen 3y agoPart of being confused by normal practices is that a lot of practices feel abnormal by default so we don't emphasize those expected actions the same way other people to. When most things feel foreign even obvious stuff takes on that vibe. Why wouldn't I help the bystander? Not because I'm better but because it's just as likely a choice as not. Very little bias there.
- at_a_remove 3y agoI've considered getting a serious adult test for something spectrumy. On the casual tests I score high on Systematizing but I fail to score low on the Empathaizing, but again, those are the casual tests. This is another point for me getting some kind of assessment, because I have a very strong anti-bystander effect that seems almost not in my control.
- tysam_and 3y agoStart with https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/ https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/ as exploration, and see the other formal tests on the page. Good re-testability, and they're part of what they use for a formal diagnosis.
- lusus_naturae 3y agoStanding up for people who can't is important, but any situation calls ensuring your own safety as well—you can't help anyone if you end up a victim yourself. The worse story in recent memory is of someone who got stabbed to death in a subway because they spoke up against someone else being racist.
- _8j50 3y agoThe only time I got in a serious fight in high school was when I saw a kid get beaten up by bullies. I mean, I was even weaker than him and got really beaten up myself but I lander a few hits and I am still proud of myself for getting beaten up. They left that kid alone after that. I saw someone getting bullied up at the workplace, eventually got fired. Wanted to do something but I was afraid for my own job. Lo and behold, it didn't matter how good or succesful I was at my job, the circle of shit came back around eventually to where I was on the business end of things. I got what I deserved. I do my best to avoid people and situations in general that might end up in me witnessing this kind of shit again but I don't think I can not do anything that way again. I don't think being averse to cowardice makes you autistic though. What's the purpose of these articles and research? Find more ways to label and box people in so they can be more easily dismissed? "Oh, we're not a bunch of bullies and cowards, that person is just autistic or 'on the spectrum'?" Is that it? Shouldn't everyone resist the bystander effect? Isn't this research doing more harm to that effect than good?
- COOL_DUDE_2112 3y ago> Standing up for people who can't is important, but any situation calls ensuring your own safety as well—you can't help anyone if you end up a victim yourself. The worse story in recent memory is of someone who got stabbed to death in a subway because they spoke up against someone else being racist. Well that's just bad situational awareness... you can keep an eye on hands, pockets etc when confronting injustice, and if you've taken martial arts you know how to stop a knife attack.
- doktrin 3y agoThis is a delusional take. Your karate class hasn’t prepared you to survive - let alone “stop” - a knife attack and the sooner you disabuse yourself of that notion the better.
- epivosism 3y agobystander effect is not valid in the first place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect#Counter_example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect#Counter_examp... even wikipedia has updated saying Counter example In 2019, a large international cultural anthropology study analyzed 219 street disputes and confrontations that were recorded by security cameras in three cities in different countries—Lancaster, Amsterdam, and Cape Town. Contrary to bystander theory, the study found that bystanders intervened in almost every case, and the chance of intervention went up with the number of bystanders; "a highly radical discovery and a completely different outcome than theory predicts."[68] This study is the first large-scale test of the bystander effect in real-life. Up until now, this effect was mainly studied in the lab by asking study subjects how they would respond in a particular situation. Another striking aspect of this study is that the observations come from three different countries including the violent country of South Africa where intervening in a street dispute is not without risk ... Nevertheless, peacemakers do draw a line according to a follow-up study ... In the case of armed robberies, bystanders intervene far less.[68]
- epivosism 3y agoThe wikipedia page seems slightly one-sided, not mentioning recent high profile cases where people who intervened in public violence or threats of it were severely punished. The perception that this rate might be changing surely contributes to the actions of everyday people.
- quickthrower2 3y agoMaybe the knowledge of the bystander effect makes people consciously avoid it. Plus all those set-up shows where they get people to do "off" shit and see how people react.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- InSteady 3y agoIf I'm reading the statistics in the study correctly [0], most of these 80 incidents (70%) were pulled from CCTV footage at a "night time drinking setting." Groups of 18 people on average standing around bars, presumably outside. In 20% of cases someone de-escalated, 5% of the time a bystander joined in to escalate the violent encounter, and 4% it was a mix of escalation/de-escalation. Presumably the rest of the time no one intervened. This is not an ideal setting to analyze the bystander effect. People are drunk. People know each other. People may have just met but started bonding over alcohol (and cigarettes, if we are outside the bar). Seems more like a study of the behavior of drunk people than anything else. Fair warning, I'm not great at interpreting statistics nor reading sociological studies, I prefer to read about medicine. I'm open to being corrected. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790599/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790599/
- tysam_and 3y agoWhat is happening in this comment section.
- raffraffraff 3y agoI'm not even sure what passes for "autism" these days. Back in the late 90s I helped out at a tiny charity that helped out family's of severely disabled kids. They would be utterly dependent on their parents for everything and needed constant supervision. Almost all were non-verbal. Due to the fact that many of them had genetic conditions, they had a bunch of health problems and also looked different to other kids their age. But I remember one kid, he was about 7, looked "normal" and had no other medical issues, but needed constant supervision and was non-verbal. I asked what was wrong with him. "He's autistic". My understanding of autism is a mix of that kid and Kim Peak (the real person behind the Rain Man movie). Fast forward to this century. I've had full conversations with successful people, who announce that they're autistic. Which austism is this article talking about and how exactly is it diagnosed?
- ddmf 3y agoKim Peak wasn't even autistic. Have a look at the DSM or ICD diagnosis criteria https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/diagnosis/diagnostic-criteria/all-audiences https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/diagnos...
- Doxin 3y agoBoth autisms are the same autism. They call autism a spectrum disorder, which essentially boils down to quite wide variations in symptoms. For any of the related symptoms in the list any specific autist may have that symptom a lot, a little, or not at all. The reason you see more "normal" for a lack of a better word people with autism these days is because we've gotten better at diagnosing the less visible issues. Someone who's non-verbal is pretty easy to spot. Someone who's verbal but doesn't show facial expressions "correctly", doesn't understand sarcasm, has a strong sense of justice, and overly detail oriented might be a lot harder to spot at a glance. Indeed most people would just mentally file such a person under "bit of an oddball". Take me for a more concrete example. I've got autism, but most people are rather surprised when I tell them, even if I've known them for years. I tend to not tell people before they know me very well, because I find it taints their perception of me. I'm generally fairly successful. I've got a home, a job, and a dog. On the other hand I struggle almost daily with identifying feelings I have. I'll often not even notice if I'm stressed for example, until I start getting random sore muscles because I've been tensing them all day. I'm super nervous in social situations I've not been in before. It feels like being part of a play but having never gotten the script and the audience is ready to laugh at any tiny mistake. I'll often misinterpret open questions, to the point where these days I'll often just refuse to answer without clarification. I'm quite picky with expectations, especially regarding food. I'll often talk over people without noticing. This sometimes upsets people, but if I try not to I just end up never getting a turn in conversation. I never know how long to keep eye contact. Do I look away too much? am I staring? I don't like getting touched unexpectedly. A simple touch on the elbow to get my attention is jarring to me. I'm often unable to ignore repetitive noises, especially if there's no pattern to the noise -- the clanging of the pipes the dishwasher generates is currently the bane of my existence. I try to plan everything into excruciating detail, which generally doesn't work anyways. I need to carefully pace myself to not run out of energy halfway through the day and have all the symptoms get worse for the rest of the day. Rooms with echo or reverb tire me out in a hurry. I'm frequently annoyed by people trying to "interpret" what I say instead of taking it at face value. I could go on and on, but my point is that it's entirely possible to seem perfectly normal outwardly and yet have a lot of hidden problems. I -- and a lot of other autistic people -- have been trying to fit in with "normal" people all my life, it's hardly surprising I've gotten good at seeming normal.
- RHSman2 3y agoAutism based post sees a 77% increase in the average word count of comments. #verbose
- honeybadger1 3y agoI have met people that clearly have autism, then I have met people who claim to have autism every time they say something bad in teams.