#social processing

Excerpt:

Jennifer O'Toole, an author and founder of the Asperkids Web site and company, was not diagnosed until after her husband, daughter and sons were found to be on the spectrum. On the outside, she looked pretty much the opposite of autistic. At Brown University, she was a cheerleader and sorority girl whose boyfriend was the president of his fraternity.

But inside, it was very different. Social life did not come at all naturally to her. She used her formidable intelligence to become an excellent mimic and actress, and the effort this took often exhausted her. From the time she started reading at three and throughout her childhood in gifted programs, O'Toole studied people the way others might study math. And then, she copied them—learning what most folks absorb naturally on the playground only through voracious novel reading and the aftermath of embarrassing gaffes.

O'Toole's story reflects the power of an individual to compensate for a developmental disability and hints at another reason females with autism can be easy to miss. Girls may have a greater ability to hide their symptoms. “If you were just judging on the basis of external behavior, you might not really notice that there's anything different about this person,” says University of Cambridge developmental psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen. “It relies much more on getting under the surface and listening to the experiences they're having rather than how they present themselves to the world.”

Our findings may also help explain why individuals with ASD exhibit adequate person perception performance in settings that allow for deliberation, reflection, and reasoning (e.g., extended time) (18). Individuals with ASD may be recruiting their knowledge of social psychological phenomena as a form of compensatory learning to understand other individuals’ mental states. For instance, consider discerning someone’s intentions. Individuals without ASD are able to automatically discern, for instance, that another individual shares their intentions via highly automatic social processes (e.g., social projection) (12). Those with ASD, however, are unable to automatically do so and, thus, may instead deliberately and systematically apply their social psychological skill to intuit others’ intentions. This interpretation aligns with a common strategy for clinical intervention in ASD, teaching social skills in terms of explicit social rules rather than mental state inference (19).

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Social-cognitive skills can take different forms, from accurately predicting individuals’ intentions, emotions, and thoughts (person perception or folk psychology) to accurately predicting social phenomena more generally. Past research has linked autism spectrum (AS) traits to person perception deficits in the general population. We tested whether AS traits also predict poor accuracy in terms of predicting generalized social phenomena, assessed via participants’ accuracy at predicting social psychological phenomena (e.g., social loafing, social projection, groupthink). We found the opposite. In a sample of ∼6,500 participants in 104 countries, AS traits predicted slightly higher social psychological skill. A second study with 400 participants suggested that heightened systemizing underlies this relationship. Our results indicate that AS traits relate positively to a form of social cognitive skill—predicting social psychological phenomena—and highlight the importance of distinguishing between divergent types of social cognition.

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Why do AS traits predict slightly higher social psychological skill? While AS traits are linked to deficits in mentalizing and affective empathy, they predict above-average systemizing—identifying rules and regularities of type systems (e.g., if x, then y) (14). Potentially, then, unlike person perception judgments, which require mentalizing and affective empathy (9), predicting social psychological phenomena relies on systemizing. Consistent with this interpretation, social-psychological skill, but not person perception, is linked to skill in intuitive physics (11), which relates to systemizing (15).

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Although past literature has documented that AS traits predict deficits in person perception (e.g., mentalizing, emotion recognition) (2⇓⇓–5), we found AS traits to positively predict an alternate social-cognitive skill—social psychological skill. And our findings indicate that this link is driven by social psychological skill relating to heightened systemizing. These findings contribute to social-cognitive theories of autism by providing a constraint in terms of the social-cognitive deficits associated with AS traits: While AS traits relate to deficits in person perception tasks, they relate slightly positively to accurately inferring social psychological phenomena. Additionally, our findings contribute to a growing literature indicating that some cognitive skills remain unaffected by, or are even enhanced by, ASD (17); we find that even a form of social-cognitive skill may be enhanced by ASD.

On top of contributing to the literature on autism, our results indicate that person perception and generalized social prediction are divergent social-cognitive skills that are predicted by different processes. While accurate person perception is predicted by mentalizing and empathic abilities (9), social psychological skill was predicted by systemizing. As such, we propose 2 divergent types of social cognition: a more individual, perceptive form pertaining to the inference of individuals’ intentions, emotions, and mental states and a more general, reasoning-based form pertaining to the inference of social phenomena more generally. Future research should more closely examine the potential mechanisms underlying these divergent types (e.g., causal inference, simulation/introspection) and how these mechanisms align and differ. Indeed, if certain processes are involved in accurate person perception but not in generalized social prediction, then these processes are particularly likely to be uniquely impacted by ASD.

The current results may even apply to the clinical domain. In study 1, participants likely to be diagnosed with ASD—participants who scored higher than the diagnostic cutoff point on the AQ-10—exhibited greater social psychological skill. This potential link likely only applies to individuals with ASD who have normal intelligence, however; individuals with lower-than-average intelligence would likely exhibit poor social psychological skill given the cognitive demands associated with this skill (11).

A theory of mind is, according to Wikipedia, “the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, knowledge, etc. — to oneself, and to others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.”

When academics talk about how autistic people don’t have a theory of mind, it sounds like that all non-autistic people, by necessary comparison simply... do.

It sounds like they all have a theory of mind and we don’t have one.

If non-autistic people had a truly comprehensive theory of mind, then I wouldn’t have felt the need to make this Tumblr. There wouldn’t be countless articles online about What Not to Say to Someone With a Chronic Illness, or endless debates about whether men and women are different and in what ways and why and what that means and what is gender anyway?, or books about how to manage your own anxieties and what the common triggers are, or why your kid won’t go to bed.

Everyone’s theory of mind is patchy. 

Researchers (including some of the most influential researchers out there) sometimes go a step further and describe autistic people as being “mind blind”. Mind blindness means that autistic people can’t “see” that other people have minds. As with non-metaphorical vision impairment, mind blindness is often spoken about in absolute terms: the autistic is mind-blind, the non-autistic is not, and blind means blind.

If you have ever spent any time around actual blind people you will know that there are many different kinds and degrees of blindness and many different ways people adapt and struggle with it. 

A blind friend once told me of her experience of blind college (which is, as you might have already guessed, a college for blind people) and all the different kinds of students who attended. You couldn’t assume how blind someone was just by looking at them, even if you knew a lot about blindness. My friend found herself frequently surprised at how much variation there was among blind people despite having been blind herself for most of her life. Some people who had more working vision than she did might struggle to navigate around a familiar room more than she struggled, where as other students who had zero light perception but walked around far more comfortably and confidently than she did and without any aids to help them. Some people you could tell they were blind by casual observation, whereas others you’d have no idea that they had complete sight loss (and, as said above, the ones who “looked blind” did not necessarily have a greater impairment of vision than the ones who did not “look blind”).

She told me about one student who she had assumed was rather rude because she never smiled at people when they passed her in the corridor or waved back when they waved to her. Then one day my friend realised that this student couldn’t see anyone, she couldn’t see anything even up-close. This other student had trained herself to make eye contact when talking to people by listening carefully and judging where a person’s voice was coming from, giving the perfect illusion of vision when she actually had none. 

If autistic people are “mind blind” then it also comes in degrees and with different coping strategies and techniques. One person with a stronger theory of mind might even struggle more than someone who has less understanding (social anxiety partly involves reflecting on what other people think of you and how you come across, after all). Others might act in a way that seems utterly bubbly and effortlessly social, but it’s learned behaviour rather than something they can keep up for more than a few hours a week. You might not realise that the autistic person you’re talking to is drawing on all kinds of logical analysis, research, and guesses to make it look like they have figured you out intuitively - but that doesn’t mean that they have no intuition at all, or that they have absolutely no mind perception in the way that some visually impaired people have no light perception.

Autistic people may have more problems with mind sight (to coin a phrase) than non-autistic people in part because we are a minority.  Non-autistic people can get away with their own blind spots because they are the predominant neurotype, and similar minds and brains have a better chance at understanding each other better. They are the 99%, quite literally. The more different we are to someone the more confounded by them we are likely to be, but you don’t even have to be part of any kind of minority to regularly feel as though people don’t “see” what you mean or don’t “see” the real you, or misunderstand what your intentions or feelings are.