wetwareproblem:

thereschocolateonmykeyboard:

wetwareproblem:

I am livid.

Apparently it’s just an accepted thing in modern medicine that auties have no theory of mind – not that we’re bad at it, but that we are incapable of attributing beliefs, emotions, or mental states to another person. And this has been a thing for thirty years now. Nearly my entire life.

The “evidence” for this:

• Social difficulties are one of the key hallmarks of autism.
• A study using new methodology, a low-res scanning method, and a sample size of six fucking people.
• Another study, using fMRIs, which showed no social response when looking at a series of moving geometric shapes that NTs apparently assign social interactions to.
• A third study, back to shitty PET imaging, where we had to guess emotional states based on pictures of eyes and nothing else.
• A fourth one where we were expected to respond differently based on where a person we watched was looking.
• And finally, one that showed less activity in a region of the brain that apparently involves social function.

Apparently not sought in any of this:

• An autistic person’s explanation of how we think about other people.

Gee, why would people with social difficulties for whom eye contact is actually painful have trouble ascribing motive to inanimate objects, or reading intent and emotion from eyes? Must be ‘cause they literally don’t have any ideas whatsoever about how anyone else’s mind works! No, no, why would we ask them how their minds work? That’s just nonsense.

And this has been Accepted Fact for basically all my life. Un-fucking-believable. The sheer lack of self-awareness in professional scholars of the human mind is breathtaking.

(Hey, anti-self-dxers! You know how you’re always saying “psychologists have more knowledge about these issues than you can?” This right here is why we’re laughing at you. This is the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from the establishment.)

Okay, let me clarify: I am autistic. Not only do I have a theory of mind, I use it way more actively than basically any neurotypical I’ve spoken to. I am literally always the one pointing out how people are sure they have reasons for doing what they do, but everyone else is just being a dick. This comes from the fact that I need it to survive on a daily basis. Because I have trouble reading nonverbal social cues, and because people tend to exploit or use disabled people at a breathtaking rate.

 I can’t just glance at someone and size them up; I am constantly, actively thinking about the motives and goals behind literally every social interaction from everybody. Because I’ve had to spend so much time and energy on figuring out how my head works, and how to manage that, which involves learning how I’m different, ie, how normal brains work. I would be unable to interact with people if I weren’t capable of constantly developing theories about their motives, intentions, and emotions. I’m nowhere near perfect at it – my hit rate will be lower than a NT’s in face-to-face communications, but that’s because you have extra data I am lacking. Given the same data set to work from, I’m willing to bet my hit rate would be higher, because I’ve had to actively develop and constantly use this tool.

NTs out of psychology 2kforever.

Okay, can I just say something (if you already know this, feel free to ignore me): If you ever have to argue about this with a neurotypical be sure to point out that this so called evidence is not based on valid research. Validity is one of the basics for scientific studies and none of these experiments are valid. Validity means that you actually measure what you are claiming to measure. Meaning that if you want to find out if autistic people have a theory of mind, you have to test that exact thing. The only way to do that, really, is to ask autistic people about how they understand/interpret other peoples social expressions. Personally, I’d think the best way to do that would be to show video footage of a social expression and ask the person about it. Like, video of the full body. Also, such small sample sizes make it very hard to get significant results. Research that doesn’t fulfill basic criteria (validity, reliability and objectivity) has literally no meaning at all. (Seriously, these examples mentioned above are very debatable in terms of operationalization for any group, not just for autistic people.) So if you ever have to argue about this, be sure to point out the many ways in which this research does not meet the most basic criteria for quality.

Yes, that’s exactly the part that brings me from “What the fuck” to “spitting with the white hot fires of a thousand angry suns”: How the hell did this become an accepted and normalized idea, if this is the support it stands on?

Oh, right, because it confirms biases.

There is so much bad science around autism – and so little of it challenged – except by autistics who are rarely listened to (thanks to organisations like A$).