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Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
- Arete314159 1y agoYeah, decluttering is torture.
- squigz 1y agoPublished in 2018 https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/1362361318793408 https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/1362361318793408
- sea-gold 1y agoThis sounds fascinating. Too bad the paper is not freely available. Side note: Be sure to check out Unpaywall[1][2] which allows you to (legally!!!) read research papers for free. [1]: https://unpaywall.org/products/extension https://unpaywall.org/products/extension [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31271101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31271101
- Tijdreiziger 1y agoAvailable here: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:edc2de03-af02-4dd4-8851-e567cb6b255a/download_file?safe_filename=Personification%2Bin%2Bautism_final%2Baccepted.pdf&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Journal+article https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:edc2de03-af02-4dd4-8851-e5... [PDF]
- j4coh 1y agoI always thought this was something I got from watching The Brave Little Toaster and similar content when I was tiny.
- benatkin 1y agoBetter than Toy Story, but Toy Story is much better known and does the same thing
- hildolfr 1y agoYeah..except that The Brave Little Toaster has a specific anti consumerism slant.. I can't imagine why the toy based story that was designed from the get-go to shovel plastic into kids via emotional hooks took off better and was better supported by the industry...
- anonymars 1y agoI can't take this kind of pressure I must confess one more dusty road Would be just a road too long Worthless IYKYK. A few touches: - "I just can't / I just can't / I just can't seem to get started" mimics a car trying to turn over - Pairing the wedding and the funeral
- r721 1y agoFun fact: The Brave Little Toaster is based on a story by Thomas M. Disch, who is a pretty interesting sci-fi writer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch
- qoez 1y agoI always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)
- sctb 1y agoI'm not fooled whatsoever into thinking LLMs are human, but I am polite in how I interact with them because the language that I use impacts my experience. Same goes with how I interact with anything, linguistically or not.
- mjburgess 1y agoI think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system: The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type. At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type. Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type. I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.
- jancsika 1y ago> I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction. What is an example of "high-engagement culture?"
- sctb 1y agoI don't have access to the full text, but based on the abstract I think it's likely that I relate to this phenomenon (I am autistic). My experience is not so much the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness through neglect or malice, I experience something like an emotional response. A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness. Or perhaps a more subtle example would be a room whose contents are haphazard or in disarray. In that situation I would sense a lack of care or attention and there might be an emotional feeling that these objects had not been respected or appreciated. It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care: e.g. insects, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc. For me there is something that "scales" down all the way to inanimate objects.
- cogman10 1y agoHere's where you can find the full paper. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326979070_Object_personification_in_autism_This_paper_will_be_very_sad_if_you_don't_read_it https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326979070_Object_pe... It's pretty short and was basically just a survey monkey survey of ~100 people (400 total) who report having autism.
- soulofmischief 1y agoI like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a soul. It's easy to get sentimental over neglected things because I seem to have an innate appreciation and sense of duty toward objects that are designed to help people. It only seems fair that the contract includes care and maintenance from the user. I live in an aging neighborhood and weep for some of these homes. I visited an abandoned unit just this weekend and went through the spectrum of sadness and anger that such a beautiful building had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. The unit was unsafe to live in, the foundation is cracking in two, one wall has a crack so large that you can see the outside and in several places, the floor is close to caving in. But the outside of the building is so nice. :( We just bought a house in the neighborhood that is in mostly good shape considering its owners were older and lived there for over 20 years. I look forward to shaping her up, replacing the roof, refinishing the floors, repairing the foundation, fixing some water damage, etc. She's a great little home and it pains me to see her not at her best. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukumogami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukumogami
- lupusreal 1y agoI'll stop personifying objects when they stop having personalities! The abstract seems to suggest that object personification is common with people who don't have autism too, perhaps less common than with people that have autism. This more or less tracks with my intuition that object personification is normal. People do it all the time with ships, cars, guns, computers, or whatever other machines they work with, whatever is important to them and complex enough to have a personality of its own.
- mlinhares 1y agoSame here, feels like a pretty normal trait, both my kids have this with their favorite toys (I had the same as well) and nowadays I do have attachment to some of my stuff, specially my kitchen utensils/devices, my kitchen aid mixer (10 years old now) even has a name. From the summary it feels like the problem is more related to the fact they have more distressing events, I don't think i've had any recently but i can think of one or two when i was a kid and lot favorite toys.
- bevr1337 1y agoThere's definitely some bias around personification. Several religions and cultures place importance on personification and/or anthropomorphism. Perhaps like auditory hallucinations, the experience can be distressing _or not_ and we can observe that between different cultures. I appreciate that the abstract highlighted where personification is unhelpful.
- lupusreal 1y agoYes, I found that part interesting. It never occurred to me that some people might find object personification to be distressing.
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- echohack5 1y ago<Date Everything! has entered the chat>
- zzzeek 1y agoI had this to a significant degree as a child, back in the world where "autism" only meant "profoundly non verbal" and such a diagnosis had nothing to do with me (and yes it could be distressing. Even to this day I sometimes feel sad about deleting text in documents and replacing it with similar text, experiencing the desperation of a perfectly fine word about to no longer exist. I told a therapist about this like ten years ago and she looked me blankly. I guess I still have this). I wrote a whole essay called "The Floor's Opinion" in grade school and I was hailed as a creative genius. In that recent story in the NYT about dating agencies for people on the spectrum, so many of the comments (in the NYT, not here) were very angry at how the definition of autism has been so greatly expanded in recent decades to include people who are high functioning. The commenters felt it took away from their own children's diagnoses, not just in name but also in terms of competition for resources, and didnt see what the point was for people who were low on the spectrum. But I will say when they identify specific traits that I've always wondered about and even told clueless therapists about, it feels way better to know a little bit of the reasoning for why you have some freakish habit.
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- shayway 1y agoThis is neither here nor there, but it's interesting that the only personification made more often by non-autistic people is gender. Demographics may explain this but I wonder if there are more broad differences in how autistic people view identity.
- earnestinger 1y agoLot of languages assign gender to objects. One should control for foreign language knowledge.
- seabird 1y agoA lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.
- energywut 1y agoIt's not the worst name for the concept when you include "a male" and "a female" as prominent nouns in that noun class. If you adjust your language depending on whether you are addressing a man or a woman (or speaking about a man or woman), then it's definitely also social gender (as well as grammatical gender), even if those two concepts are separate.
- seabird 1y agoExcept there's no mandate that "a male" and "a female" are of different noun classes, nor are the nouns for man/woman abnormally privileged in most cases. I know Dutch has fused masculine/feminine nouns into a "common" gender, leaving the language with effectively only the common and neuter genders. If I remember correctly, a similar thing has happened in Swedish and Danish. Some languages have various concepts of animacy driving the system. Some languages have shitloads of noun classes. You can adjust your language depending on the biological gender of who you're addressing in English, but English doesn't have grammatical gender in any meaningful way. The concepts are largely orthogonal. Calling it gender really is just a bad, misleading name in the grand scheme of things.
- nailer 1y agoPlease don’t anthropomorphise research papers - they hate it.
- carterschonwald 1y agoI don’t experience that at all, but definitely do associatively recall all the nontrivial uses / interactions I’ve had with items. It makes organizing stuff a mentally exhausting activity unless I’m in the right head space.
- wcoenen 1y ago> We carried out an online survey, administered via Survey Monkey This type of thing, where they do some statistics on survey data, seems to be fairly typical in psychology research. But I find it hard to believe that you can actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys. There must be selection effects: "The survey was advertised on social media and through the researchers’ own networks". And the questions may not be interpreted by the respondents as imagined. What does it mean if you select "None of the above" in their core question? That you think that objects have no attributes whatsoever? "Do you ever view objects as having: Gender / Human-like attributes / Feelings / Other / None of the above" See also "replication crisis". Psychology is at the center of it.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago> I find it hard to believe that you can get actually get good data from self-reporting in surveys. Especially when you consider the Lizardman's Constant of 4% https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and... This article was written in 2013. The Internet has become a significantly more toxic place since then, and I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
- Tijdreiziger 1y ago> […] I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days. On what basis?
- vntok 1y agoAn online survey administered via Survey Monkey, of course.
- wafflemaker 1y agoOn basis of spending a lot of my teenage time browsing 4chan, I'd say it's not 15%, but closer to 69% or even whole 420%. You just loose faith in humanity from spending too much time on the internet.
- cogman10 1y agoThis is a good example of research that is too preliminary for anyone to form any conclusions about. It was 400 people, 100 of whom report having autism. And it was conducted by posting links to the survey monkey survey on social media. It might have some interesting follow up studies, but I find no reason to really take this for much other than an indicator that further study should be done.
- Barrin92 1y agoTake this with a grain of salt because I am not autistic but my first intuition when reading the paper wasn't that autistic people antropomorphize objects, but maybe its the other way around. Namely that they have less of a subjective or interior view on people, how other people see them and maybe how they see themselves (there's some comments to that effect in this thread) Again because I don't have direct experience with it I don't want to lean too much into stereotypes, but it seems possible to me that people with autism have a more monistic, or at least less dualistic view on these things because the kind of thing that makes other people distinguish between subjects and objects is less present in people with autism.
- stego-tech 1y agoI’m glad to see more research into this phenomena. Not the best data out there, sure, but it’s a start that could incentivize further research with proper sample sizes and procedures. This is an issue I’m acutely familiar with. Everything of import is, to a degree, personified. Not everything gets a name, necessarily, but everything has an “identity” which helps me to process events and interactions with it. AVR crashes? “Oh, she’s being pissy today.” Car taking a little longer to start in the morning? “I know girl, I’m tired too.” This extends to treatment: the more personified the object, the better its treatment. Stuffed animals get names and apologies, as does Siri (though the voice assistants also get a tongue lashing when they’re non-performant). When I retire something, I try to find it a good home before trashing it (which is why an old Pioneer HDMI 2.0 AVR is still sitting in a box, alone and unloved by a new owner). I treat objects with the same reverence I treat people, which earns me the occasional eyeroll. I’d love to know more about why this phenomena is so prevalent in autistic people, and what the benefits or harms of it are. Here’s hoping another team takes up this baton and runs with it some more.
- Vaslo 1y agoMy small daughter is mildly autistic. Very friendly but overly obsessed with the life of bugs and very concerned about human like tendencies in bugs. She personifies other objects but it seems hard to tell if that’s just a child thing or one of her symptoms. Even with the bugs I’m always wondering if that’s a kid thing too, but the fact the other kids her age couldn’t care less about bugs makes me wonder if it’s autism related.
- energywut 1y agoIt's both. Child neurological development goes through a lot of mirroring the environments they observe in play, and mapping them onto stuffed animals, dolls, bugs, pets, toys, etc. There's an age where kids are developing interiority (children do not have an "inner voice" and do not develop it until 5-7, typically) and during that time, a lot of their play is them learning the rules and developing empathy (children do not have a concept of being able to put themselves in others shoes until age 3-7, typically). Autistic children are often times very interested in learning rules and applying them in other settings. Autistic young women, especially, are navigating a complicated social environment that strongly encourages them to understand the rules of what it means to be a woman in society. Learning those rules and then saying, "Ok little (bugs|stuffed animals|toys), here's how things work" is both a thing kids do and a thing autistic kids do. Couple that with special interests (dinosaurs, trains, bugs, bones, whatever), and you'll often see autistic kids getting WAY into one particular thing and then mapping the world they experience onto that thing.
- drivingmenuts 1y ago"Normal people" do it, too - ask a sailor about ship. Some people name and gender their vehicles. To a certain extent, it comes from close association with object. I'm the guy who drives around with a cartoon drawing of a robot in his car that will utterly destroy anyone who tries to steal it, so I ought to know.
- hildolfr 1y agoSailors, at least the ones I know, are often superstitious because 1) marine tradition is filled with legends and beliefs 2) the sea is cruel and unforgiving. No one wants to be sinking while remembering that they forgot to christen the boat , they just killed a seabird, and they stepped onto the boat with their left foot. My point: I see marine superstition as a cultural affect rather than a sign of any such other psychology.
- kgwgk 1y agothe sea is [a] cruel and unforgiving [mistress]
- doright 1y agoInanimate objects won't berate you in response to ascribing a state of being to them against their will.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoReminds me of a theme in the cult classic Shooting Fish where the more technical-minded con artist was accused of repairing old household appliances out of pity.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoSo proof that the OOO crowd is autistic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
- ThinkBeat 1y agoIt sounds that the paper indetified that autistic people do this at the same ratio everyone else? """ Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
- cootsnuck 1y agoAnd perhaps more often than in the general population.
- dfsegoat 1y agoI also relate - but have not received a formal diagnosis other than ADD. - I remember feeling sorry for cars in a car dealership on a hot summer day as a child: "they must be miserable in this heat!" - I frequently to this day personify my childrens stuffed animals & dolls & action figures: "They must feel so lonely not being played with anymore!" - I was inordinately attached to my own stuffed animals / toys as a kid. I remember when one got taken away during a schoolday, that I felt like someone had kidnapped a family member - and I was inconsolable. It's fantastic to see that this is now being investigated in the literature.
- d_burfoot 1y agoI feel a very deep, apparently irrational reluctance to throw away objects I no longer need, especially if those objects are well-crafted. I feel that doing so is disrespectful of the love and effort the object's creator invested in them.
- neilv 1y agoSomething I've wondered that's maybe related: How many people "feel" systems? Like, if you're designing, building, or managing a large and complex system, and there are concerns in different aspects of it, and you have maybe a kind of emotional coprocessor about it, e.g., keeping track of all the parts that bother you, and how much they bother you? (Also, parts that you like.) I'm pretty sure that not all people have nearly the same capacity for this, but I don't know the distribution.
- leksak 1y agoDecidedly relatable to me to the point where I have a custom field on our ClickUps called ” Pain ” at my work
- gwbas1c 1y agoAbout half of my time spent coding is making the code "feel good." It's really important, too. That's how the code becomes maintainable for the next person.
- 1dom 1y agoI relate to this quite a lot, and I've met a few different people over my career that I feel have the same gut intuition or instinct for systems. You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field, often within a few sentences. It's really eye opening moving between areas of high and low densities people like this. I did used to think it was normal and common but I've definitely come to doubt that as I've got older. I think it's been a hindrance at times though, particularly in some business environments that aren't producing systems that feel nice. Although there's a certain satisfaction and special sense of achievement in making an unhappy feeling system do amazing things.
- neilv 1y ago> You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field, often within a few sentences. Exactly. But don't let the interview people know that, or it will become another ritual that everyone checkboxes and fakes. :)
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- kalium-xyz 1y agoYou see this used even as diagnostic criteria yet when people attribute malice to their computer or car its considered normal. To me this is just normal anthropomorphization and the confusion regarding emotions in autism. I honestly am convinced there is nothing but communication going wrong here
- labrador 1y agoThis topic has been of interest to me but I've approached it from different directions: Japanese Shintoism, the idea that objects can be numinous and panpsychism. I wonder if the "sadness" referenced in the paper's title stems not from object personification itself, but from living in a culture that lacks frameworks for these experiences. In cultures with concepts like Shinto kami (where objects can have spiritual essence) or similar animistic traditions, someone who senses that their broken tool has been "disrespected" or feels that a neglected room carries emotional weight wouldn't be pathologized. These experiences would have cultural validation and shared language.
- Aziell 1y agoSomething I’ve been thinking about is whether it’s partly because people sometimes don’t really know how to describe what they’re feeling, so they end up putting those emotions onto objects. It kind of helps make sense of feelings that are hard to explain. At the same time, I wonder if it’s always a good thing. Like, what happens if you lose or break something you’ve gotten really attached to? Could that make the anxiety worse? Curious if anyone here has seen this or has any personal experience.
- LiKao 1y agoYes, this is very common. Autistic people can easily go into meltdown if they loose an object that they assign emotional states to. In severe cases it can be sufficient if the object is slightly moved to trigger a meltdown, and there are reports that support those exact thinking patterns.
- andrzejalatk 1y ago[dead]
- cainxinth 1y agoReminds me of Spike Jonze’s famous IKEA lamp ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg