#ableism(?)

-despite the BASIC definition of ToM being the ability to understand that others are capable of independent thought, many people will extend the definition and refer to difficulty in discerning what other people’s thoughts are as a ToM deficit, even when there’s full understanding of the existence of said thoughts. by this framework there is an argument to be made for an autistic ToM deficit, but only if you also declare basically all other people to have ToM deficits - show me a person who is always capable of accurately guessing all the thoughts of everyone they meet. i’ll wait.

-the above problem persists even when attempting to narrow the requirement to just possessing “socially acceptable” levels of understanding of other people’s thoughts by using cues like body language, tone, and facial expression - sure, two people who share a background can probably do that, but people from significantly different cultures from each other will likely struggle with it, as will people with different life experiences or different neurotypes - in my experience allistic people tend to be even fucking worse at guessing MY thoughts and feelings than i am at guessing theirs, even though they can easily read other allistic people and i can easily read other autistic people. i’ve seen many other autistic people corroborate this. so ONCE AGAIN @ allistic people being annoying about ToM: where’s YOUR theory of mind???

-some of the most common tests for determining ToM look like garbage and are very obviously phrased in a way that will trip up a lot of autistic people for reasons totally unrelated to theory of mind. for example, the popular sally-anne test involves, to quote wikipedia,

“the child is shown two dolls, Sally and Anne, who have a basket and a box, respectively. Sally also has a marble, which she places into her basket, and then leaves the room. While she is out of the room, Anne takes the marble from the basket and puts it into the box. Sally returns, and the child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the basket, where Sally put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the box, where the child knows the marble is hidden, even though Sally cannot know this, since she did not see it hidden there.”

i’d fail this thing for sure if i didn’t know the conceit of the test ahead of time. why? different interpretation of the language used: my natural inclination would be to say sally would look in the box, in response to opening her basket expecting the marble and seeing that the marble wasn’t there. this first step of the process, where she would open the basket expecting the marble, doesn’t naturally register to me as “looking for the marble” because she’d THINK she knew where it was. when i go get my medicine from the medicine cabinet i am not “looking for” it, i know exactly where that shit is, or at least expect to. ONLY if it is not where it’s expected would i refer to the activity of searching for it in unusual locations as “looking for the medicine.” so, if asked to describe the expected sequence of events involving the marble, my natural inclination would be to say, “sally would go to retrieve the marble from her basket, realize that it wasn’t there, and then look for it in the box.” ironically enough this requires an extra step of ToM - the understanding that when two kids are hanging out and one of their toys goes missing, the child whose toy got lost is likely to expect thievery. however, if instead of being asked to explain the whole series of events, i was simply asked where sally would look for her marble- i’d just say “the box.” the researchers would mark down that i didn’t have ToM, and would make absolutely no effort whatsoever to figure out why i reached that conclusion. if you take into account that this is even the case for me and my pretty good grasp of like, the general workings of language, and that a lot of autistic people have far more significant difficulty grasping the workings of language, you end up with even more possible communication breakdowns- for instance, what if the person misunderstands the question and thinks you’re asking where sally SHOULD look? what if they get the characters’ names mixed up? and so on. it is an absolute linguistic minefield, there are far too many potential communication errors for this to reliably measure ToM. and yet again, we have a flagrant example of people who are legit RESEARCHING ToM failing to display much of it themselves - there’s an abject failure to consider autistic people’s actual thought processes there.