8 ms·

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

46 points by Frummy 3y ago

monero-xmr 3y ago
Consciousness - what it is, how it arises - not proven. A subject full of quantum woo and statements declared as facts but the conjecture is everywhere. In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism. This is where thoughts and consciousness arise purely from physical reality and have a chemical and physical basis (“thoughts have mass”). If you rewound the universe to the beginning, always the same outcome, free will is a delusion. In the minority you have dualism, where the mind and body are separate. This is metaphysics. I subscribe to the latter belief. My personal (insane sounding) opinion is that there is one universal consciousness and we all channel into it with our minds.
- px43 3y ago
  Not proven? It's not even well defined. You can't prove anything meaningful about terms that can't even be defined.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Exactly! But people make all sorts of statements about it and we can’t even agree on base concepts. This audiobook is a pretty good introduction. The whole thing makes my brain hurt https://www.audible.com/pd/B00D97UL5K?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=player_overflow https://www.audible.com/pd/B00D97UL5K?source_code=ASSORAP051...
- namaria 3y ago
  I have the same idea about how reality comes together. Hard materialism cannot help but run into fundamental contradictions so it must be false. I think consciousness must be the fundamental nature of reality, and our minds are shards or prisms of it. And the experience of the material world is itself emergent. You might like a book called Biocentrism by Lanza and Berman.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! I will add it to my list
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Ever watch someone's personality change after they develop Alzheimer's or dementia? It can be rather disturbing. Same goes for people who drift in and out of depression or bipolar disorders. There are mood changes, but with them come changes to risk tolerance and a host of other fundamental things. At the end of the day, a person's character is in some way biologically defined, so any expression of consciousness must also be affected as well.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Like I said my view is complete conjecture and based upon my own religious and spiritual beliefs. I think the brain is channeling the universal consciousness and as it is filtered by the mind, it results in different personalities. The essence of “you” is always there, whether you are asleep or demented or unborn or an infant. Obviously who you are can change. This is a very complex topic I cannot articulate hardly at all in this comment. I also believe in God and practice Catholicism but I think Jesus was a supra-conscious supernatural being. I know I sound totally insane but this is my personal belief system so no one can take it away from me!
    - lazide 3y ago
      Just wait until you ask a Buddhist monk the question ‘what is “me”’?
  - thfuran 3y ago
    In some way? A person is biological. Everything about them (barring the occasional medical implant) is wholly biologically determined.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      A great many people believe there is some intrinsic connection between body, mind, consciousness and soul. They think that when they die, their soul will retain the memories of their life, and will bear culpability for the good and bad actions in life (karma, divine judgment, etc). For this to make sense, the soul has to in some way influence or be responsible for a person's character. My argument was only that it cannot be directly and completely responsible, given the obvious changes to character as the brain undergoes changes. Having read the post I was replying to, you'll note that your suggestion has already been made in the context of physicalism. I merely offered a mild critique of the opposing view, metaphysicalism.
- why_at 3y ago
  >In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism. I'm not an expert in the philosophy of consciousness or free will or anything, but it's my understanding that most philosophers are compatibilists even if they are physicalists. So it's not necessarily true that physicalism leads to hard determinism.
LNSY 3y ago
[flagged]
drooby 3y ago
I guess it's interesting that these studies fail to replicate. But I fail to see how saying a "lack of theory of mind" is not a very accurate way to communicate the experience and symptoms of autism. Autistic people, by their own account and by well documented empirical evidence, express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc. Autistic people have a unique set of difficulties with maintaining friendships and employment. Now, I'll take two definitions of Theory of Mind: > Theory of Mind is the branch of cognitive science that investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons. [0] > In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own.[1] Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. [1] So... I'm confused. If autism is the impaired ability to ascribe mental states , how then is autism not an impaired ability to form theory of mind? Are we just arguing semantics here? The authors of this research might be resting their case on a slippery re-definition of theory of mind? > The assertion that autistic people lack a theory of mind—that they fail to understand that other people have a mind or that they themselves have a mind—pervades psychology. Of course Autistic people understand that other people "have a mind" or "that they themselves have a mind".. This seems ridiculous. I have had many relationships with autistic people and obviously they know what a mind is and that other people have a mind. [0] - https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/ https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
- StopTheTechies 3y ago
  Not to mention this presumes some "default" way the mind works that is commonly presumed and commonly accurate, which seems transparently absurd.
- iamdbtoo 3y ago
  I think they are claiming the opposite and that autistic people don't lack theory of mind, but that the theory of mind claim is stemmed from their communication impaiarment. I am no expert, but I think they are trying to overcome the idea you're presenting. > Because theory-of-mind tasks rely heavily on “fairly complex language” (San José Cáceres, Keren, Booth, & Happé, 2014, p. 608) and because autism, by diagnostic definition, involves communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Morson, & Grace, 2016), it is unsurprising that autistic participants with communication impairment perform less well than nonautistic participants without communication impairment. And because autistic people vary in their communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Geye, & Ellis Weismer, 2005), it is unsurprising that autistic people vary in their theory-of-mind task performance.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
I've only read the abstract, but it seems to directly say "this paper ignores any unflawed research that supports the idea that autistic people have no theory of mind." (a) says it looks at empirical research that fails to support the theory, (b) is targeting examples that fail to replicate, (c) documents studies they believe made some inherent mistake, (c)2 (why are there two c?) looks at external research that does not support the theory, and (d) is the conclusion made ignoring any research supporting the theory. Usually when I see these meta-studies, they say they look at all of the data and then will further say they excluded some for some kind of flaw. This one seems surprisingly open about choosing it's data.
delichon 3y ago
I don't think that I'm "on the spectrum" but I'm quite bad at predicting social responses to stimuli. I don't know when a joke will get a laugh or be offensive, when a comment here will get voted up or down, when flirting or a complement is harassment, etc. I interpret this as meaning that my theory of mind is deficient, it's a poor simulation of reality. That perspective can form a weaker claim about autistic people that's more defensible: they have theories of mind like anyone, but at best different, and at worst maladaptive. We can recognize that they have a theory of mind and still recognize that some are deficient or as with various forms of bigotry, diseased. High functioning autistics like Temple Grandin who appear to have a better functioning theory of mind than mine make me think that ToM isn't at the core of autism.
- jjav 3y ago
  > I don't think that I'm "on the spectrum" but I'm quite bad at predicting social responses to stimuli. I don't know when a joke will get a laugh or be offensive, when a comment here will get voted up or down, when flirting or a complement is harassment, etc. Interestingly, all of these also have a cultural aspect. One can be excellent at predicting all these reactions in one culture and be a complete failure at it in a different culture, even though you are the same person.
swayvil 3y ago
"Those who are habitually concentrated" I like that description. In meditation, the first trick we learn is a refined form of concentration. So such people have a definite leg-up. (They were the preferred recruits among the Buddhist/yogi/... Oh let's just call them wizards.)
logicchains 3y ago
GPT4 has a theory of mind; if you describe a situation to it, it can predict reasonably well how a person in that situation would respond to a particular stimuli. So clearly there isn't a biological basis to having/lacking a theory of mind.
jimberlage 3y ago
I've heard that theory of mind issue described as "cannot reliably make predictions based on what other people might think or do.", which is more nuanced than the other definition of "doesn't understand that other people have minds of their own." Using the first definition, about prediction, makes a lot of sense and is a useful psychological concept. The first definition would predict theory of mind issues in unrelated disorders, which I think you do see: - Autism: the mind's ability to process social cues is not there or severely diminished. You'd expect these individuals to be bad predictors of others because they don't get or can't use sensory information that others do. - Schizotypal personality disorder: they experience intrusive thoughts. They might be bad predictors of others because they assume that everyone else gets intrusive, paranoid thoughts on a regular basis.
- jimberlage 3y ago
  It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven. Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments. It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output. You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.
AlbertCory 3y ago
This struck me as suitable for a legal definition, maybe, if "theory of mind" needed one. However, I don't know how someone could be diagnosed as "autistic" such that you could say "autistic people don't have a theory of mind." I mean, how did you decide they were "autistic" in the first place? All you have to do is read some documentation written by a technical person to see that they have no sense of what other people know. Arguing whether that should be called "theory of mind" or if it needs some other name strikes me as just semantics -- useful for a researcher or the DSM, maybe, but of no value to the lay person. For an ordinary person, we can just say, "yeah, they can't put themselves in someone else's place."
gweinberg 3y ago
Are normal people really any good at figuring out what other people are thinking? Or is it just that, being more similar to other people, the heuristic "he's thinking pretty much the same thing as what I'd be thinking" works pretty well? Temple Grandin call herself the woman who thinks like a cow. I very much doubt she does think like a cow, but she seems to better at empathizing with cows that neurotypical people are. Does she really have defective empathy?
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
No Javascript: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4709904447255990&w=tqV20BM3arJd0XfNoP8ocejqGL7M0K-_ https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4709904447255990&w=tqV20BM... Even better: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/
drewcoo 3y ago
My diagnosis allowed me to finally realize why neurotypicals seem to lack "theory of mind," why they act so inconsistently, seem so superstitiously, and be so prone to believing they have unprovable "mental powers." We autistics are actually the James Randy in this realm of self-believed nonsense! No one has collected our million dollars yet but there are so many "believers" that it's very disconcerting! https://www.skepdic.com/randi.html https://www.skepdic.com/randi.html

46 points by Frummy 3y ago

Consciousness - what it is, how it arises - not proven. A subject full of quantum woo and statements declared as facts but the conjecture is everywhere. In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism. This is where thoughts and consciousness arise purely from physical reality and have a chemical and physical basis (“thoughts have mass”). If you rewound the universe to the beginning, always the same outcome, free will is a delusion. In the minority you have dualism, where the mind and body are separate. This is metaphysics. I subscribe to the latter belief. My personal (insane sounding) opinion is that there is one universal consciousness and we all channel into it with our minds.

px43 3y ago
Not proven? It's not even well defined. You can't prove anything meaningful about terms that can't even be defined.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Exactly! But people make all sorts of statements about it and we can’t even agree on base concepts. This audiobook is a pretty good introduction. The whole thing makes my brain hurt https://www.audible.com/pd/B00D97UL5K?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=player_overflow https://www.audible.com/pd/B00D97UL5K?source_code=ASSORAP051...
namaria 3y ago
I have the same idea about how reality comes together. Hard materialism cannot help but run into fundamental contradictions so it must be false. I think consciousness must be the fundamental nature of reality, and our minds are shards or prisms of it. And the experience of the material world is itself emergent. You might like a book called Biocentrism by Lanza and Berman.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation! I will add it to my list
zdragnar 3y ago
Ever watch someone's personality change after they develop Alzheimer's or dementia? It can be rather disturbing. Same goes for people who drift in and out of depression or bipolar disorders. There are mood changes, but with them come changes to risk tolerance and a host of other fundamental things. At the end of the day, a person's character is in some way biologically defined, so any expression of consciousness must also be affected as well.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Like I said my view is complete conjecture and based upon my own religious and spiritual beliefs. I think the brain is channeling the universal consciousness and as it is filtered by the mind, it results in different personalities. The essence of “you” is always there, whether you are asleep or demented or unborn or an infant. Obviously who you are can change. This is a very complex topic I cannot articulate hardly at all in this comment. I also believe in God and practice Catholicism but I think Jesus was a supra-conscious supernatural being. I know I sound totally insane but this is my personal belief system so no one can take it away from me!
  - lazide 3y ago
    Just wait until you ask a Buddhist monk the question ‘what is “me”’?
- thfuran 3y ago
  In some way? A person is biological. Everything about them (barring the occasional medical implant) is wholly biologically determined.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    A great many people believe there is some intrinsic connection between body, mind, consciousness and soul. They think that when they die, their soul will retain the memories of their life, and will bear culpability for the good and bad actions in life (karma, divine judgment, etc). For this to make sense, the soul has to in some way influence or be responsible for a person's character. My argument was only that it cannot be directly and completely responsible, given the obvious changes to character as the brain undergoes changes. Having read the post I was replying to, you'll note that your suggestion has already been made in the context of physicalism. I merely offered a mild critique of the opposing view, metaphysicalism.
why_at 3y ago
>In broad strokes you have the majority which are physicalists, which leads to strong determinism. I'm not an expert in the philosophy of consciousness or free will or anything, but it's my understanding that most philosophers are compatibilists even if they are physicalists. So it's not necessarily true that physicalism leads to hard determinism.

LNSY 3y ago

[flagged]

drooby 3y ago

I guess it's interesting that these studies fail to replicate. But I fail to see how saying a "lack of theory of mind" is not a very accurate way to communicate the experience and symptoms of autism. Autistic people, by their own account and by well documented empirical evidence, express and demonstrate challenges with understanding sarcasm, irony, nonverbal cues, idioms, figures of speech, etc. Autistic people have a unique set of difficulties with maintaining friendships and employment. Now, I'll take two definitions of Theory of Mind: > Theory of Mind is the branch of cognitive science that investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons. [0] > In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own.[1] Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. [1] So... I'm confused. If autism is the impaired ability to ascribe mental states , how then is autism not an impaired ability to form theory of mind? Are we just arguing semantics here? The authors of this research might be resting their case on a slippery re-definition of theory of mind? > The assertion that autistic people lack a theory of mind—that they fail to understand that other people have a mind or that they themselves have a mind—pervades psychology. Of course Autistic people understand that other people "have a mind" or "that they themselves have a mind".. This seems ridiculous. I have had many relationships with autistic people and obviously they know what a mind is and that other people have a mind. [0] - https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/ https://iep.utm.edu/theomind/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

StopTheTechies 3y ago
Not to mention this presumes some "default" way the mind works that is commonly presumed and commonly accurate, which seems transparently absurd.
iamdbtoo 3y ago
I think they are claiming the opposite and that autistic people don't lack theory of mind, but that the theory of mind claim is stemmed from their communication impaiarment. I am no expert, but I think they are trying to overcome the idea you're presenting. > Because theory-of-mind tasks rely heavily on “fairly complex language” (San José Cáceres, Keren, Booth, & Happé, 2014, p. 608) and because autism, by diagnostic definition, involves communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Morson, & Grace, 2016), it is unsurprising that autistic participants with communication impairment perform less well than nonautistic participants without communication impairment. And because autistic people vary in their communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Geye, & Ellis Weismer, 2005), it is unsurprising that autistic people vary in their theory-of-mind task performance.

boomboomsubban 3y ago

I've only read the abstract, but it seems to directly say "this paper ignores any unflawed research that supports the idea that autistic people have no theory of mind." (a) says it looks at empirical research that fails to support the theory, (b) is targeting examples that fail to replicate, (c) documents studies they believe made some inherent mistake, (c)2 (why are there two c?) looks at external research that does not support the theory, and (d) is the conclusion made ignoring any research supporting the theory. Usually when I see these meta-studies, they say they look at all of the data and then will further say they excluded some for some kind of flaw. This one seems surprisingly open about choosing it's data.

delichon 3y ago

I don't think that I'm "on the spectrum" but I'm quite bad at predicting social responses to stimuli. I don't know when a joke will get a laugh or be offensive, when a comment here will get voted up or down, when flirting or a complement is harassment, etc. I interpret this as meaning that my theory of mind is deficient, it's a poor simulation of reality. That perspective can form a weaker claim about autistic people that's more defensible: they have theories of mind like anyone, but at best different, and at worst maladaptive. We can recognize that they have a theory of mind and still recognize that some are deficient or as with various forms of bigotry, diseased. High functioning autistics like Temple Grandin who appear to have a better functioning theory of mind than mine make me think that ToM isn't at the core of autism.

jjav 3y ago
> I don't think that I'm "on the spectrum" but I'm quite bad at predicting social responses to stimuli. I don't know when a joke will get a laugh or be offensive, when a comment here will get voted up or down, when flirting or a complement is harassment, etc. Interestingly, all of these also have a cultural aspect. One can be excellent at predicting all these reactions in one culture and be a complete failure at it in a different culture, even though you are the same person.

swayvil 3y ago

"Those who are habitually concentrated" I like that description. In meditation, the first trick we learn is a refined form of concentration. So such people have a definite leg-up. (They were the preferred recruits among the Buddhist/yogi/... Oh let's just call them wizards.)

logicchains 3y ago

GPT4 has a theory of mind; if you describe a situation to it, it can predict reasonably well how a person in that situation would respond to a particular stimuli. So clearly there isn't a biological basis to having/lacking a theory of mind.

jimberlage 3y ago

I've heard that theory of mind issue described as "cannot reliably make predictions based on what other people might think or do.", which is more nuanced than the other definition of "doesn't understand that other people have minds of their own." Using the first definition, about prediction, makes a lot of sense and is a useful psychological concept. The first definition would predict theory of mind issues in unrelated disorders, which I think you do see: - Autism: the mind's ability to process social cues is not there or severely diminished. You'd expect these individuals to be bad predictors of others because they don't get or can't use sensory information that others do. - Schizotypal personality disorder: they experience intrusive thoughts. They might be bad predictors of others because they assume that everyone else gets intrusive, paranoid thoughts on a regular basis.

jimberlage 3y ago
It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven. Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments. It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output. You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.

AlbertCory 3y ago

This struck me as suitable for a legal definition, maybe, if "theory of mind" needed one. However, I don't know how someone could be diagnosed as "autistic" such that you could say "autistic people don't have a theory of mind." I mean, how did you decide they were "autistic" in the first place? All you have to do is read some documentation written by a technical person to see that they have no sense of what other people know. Arguing whether that should be called "theory of mind" or if it needs some other name strikes me as just semantics -- useful for a researcher or the DSM, maybe, but of no value to the lay person. For an ordinary person, we can just say, "yeah, they can't put themselves in someone else's place."

gweinberg 3y ago

Are normal people really any good at figuring out what other people are thinking? Or is it just that, being more similar to other people, the heuristic "he's thinking pretty much the same thing as what I'd be thinking" works pretty well? Temple Grandin call herself the woman who thinks like a cow. I very much doubt she does think like a cow, but she seems to better at empathizing with cows that neurotypical people are. Does she really have defective empathy?

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

No Javascript: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4709904447255990&w=tqV20BM3arJd0XfNoP8ocejqGL7M0K-_ https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4709904447255990&w=tqV20BM... Even better: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/

drewcoo 3y ago

My diagnosis allowed me to finally realize why neurotypicals seem to lack "theory of mind," why they act so inconsistently, seem so superstitiously, and be so prone to believing they have unprovable "mental powers." We autistics are actually the James Randy in this realm of self-believed nonsense! No one has collected our million dollars yet but there are so many "believers" that it's very disconcerting! https://www.skepdic.com/randi.html https://www.skepdic.com/randi.html