Judgement day! (a new study shows autistic adults judge)

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http://health.usnews.com/health-news/fa ... intentions

Guilty as charged I am afraid. I put the "J" in the INTJ (briggs and meyer) classification.

LOL!

Still is interesting the possible negative outcomes of this thinking.

I'm an ESFP yet also guilty as charged. I'm just slower to make my judgment and honestly try to avoid it but when I have to, it's final.

I have a hard time with this too.... usually T is there to explain other peoples intentions or explain why I shouldn't be mad. I try really hard to have an open mind but I guess my thinking is so rigid it doesn't matter.

I'm the opposite. My first impulse is to try to understand the person's intentions and judge him by those intentions.

This still suffers from the language issue in theory of mind tests, though.

I'm also culpable as charged.

I try not to be judgemental but there are times I find peoples behaviour incredibly irrational and incomprehensible. It can be difficult not to express that exasperation, but as a moderator I bite my tongue and just stick to enforcing the site rules.

This sounds to me like "How can we keep weighting the tests to prove that autistic people lack theory of mind?" In other words, did they keep producing increasingly convoluted scenarios until autistic adults produced the desired results? I wonder.

And does a lack of consideration for intention equate to a lack of theory of mind?

Also, I agree with Callista: I think intent is one of the facts of any given situation and thus relevant. Intent does not prevent harm or responsibility, but there's a difference between deliberately killing someone and accidentally or unintentionally causing another's death.

Maybe I'm just too used to being judged on what people see, and how they use their perceptions to define my what my intentions supposedly really are.

Last edited by Verdandi on 02 Feb 2011, 2:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I would like to know more about the study. The article was to brief to give me any real sense of what was being tested.

But it was certainly no big surprise.

No wonder some aspies get mad at other aspies for their ASness and not cut them some slack.

Nope not guilty. I am easily a forgiving person if something was an accident or an innocent mistake. Same as if someone didn't understand their intention I try and cut them some slack and try and help them understand and not hate them for it or view them as bad. Even if someone did something horrible and it was all intentional and I think it was nothing and no big deal, I can easily forgive them because I move on and don't feel so angry about it but that doesn't mean I won't view them as bad nor like them.

But I am guilty in the Sally Ann test. I wouldn't have passed it under age ten but would have by age 11 because that was when my TOM started to develope. That's when I started to realize things.

Yes, I am also guilty of bring judgemental. But I'm not convinced it's necessarily a bad thing. Nor am I convinced that it's because we don't understand peoples intentions. Everyone, regardless of whether you have a theory of mind or not, is making assumptions about what someone is thinking or feeling. We aren't mind readers, so we can't be absolutely sure what someone is thinking or feeling.

I've noticed that if someone Is nasty, bad, whatever, that I tend to judge them as being a bad person and try to avoid them. Whereas, other people seems to gloss over their behaviour, especially if the "bad person" is nice to them. If I knew someone was bullying someone else, but they were nice to me, I would still judge them as being a bully And avoid them. That's not because I don't have a theory of mind, it's due to the fact that I have a strong sense of morality and believe people should do what is right.

If the friend in the jellyfish senario had ensured her source was reliable, her friend may not have died. So it's her fault for being incompetent. Of course, if her friend had been more cautious regarding her information that jellyfish are harmless, she also may not have died.

I've found that while I am judgemental, I'm generally among the most forgiving when it comes to publicized crimes.

If the poison was an accident, then no punishment should be given.

As for the second case . . . it seems absolute to me that the friend who was stung and died should not rely on the information of a friend who is not a zoological professional. So in this case, I have judged the victim, found them wanting of sense, and decided that while death may be a harsh punishment, it is not unfair.

I tend to piss a lot of people off when discussing criminals of questionable maleficence in the news. I find NTs get very, very sympathetic and emotional when looking at legal issues. They become quite charged.

I have zero revenge instinct as well so that may have something to do with it. If I had but a spark of vengeance, I assume my pendulum could swing quite heavily in the other direction.

Yep, I'm either INTJ or INTP... depends on my mood.

It depend on who "did" it.

If it was a longtime frend and I know they
wood feel bad for the malfunction, I cannot
hate them, I might take longer to "recover"
than most peple, but I cood not hate them.

If it was someone I did not know as well then
I cod not trust that person for a long time
and I wood either just say no or I wood
say "ok" then not consider their data as valid
unless I saw proof otherwise.

The people on this forum seem friendly and nonjudgmental to me. I have no memory of receiving any put-downs from others. But, my wife says that I look through the world though rose colored glasses.

For me, I think I would be more likely to blame the person (rather than forgive) if the mistake they made involved carelessness or plain lack of observation.

For example, take the sugar/poison scenario:
Was the poison in a container labeled "sugar", and did it have the same color/texture/consistency of sugar? (In this case, the mistake is at least somewhat understandable). Or did the person just pick up a random container of white powder off of the shelf and add it to the drink without examining it closely?

With the jellyfish, did the person actually read somewhere that the jellyfish were harmless? (In this case, the person who wrote/published the inaccurate information would be to blame). Or are they confusing the jellyfish with another species?

I doubt the scenarios in the study went into this much detail, so I probably wouldn't have been an ideal test subject

But I think you can see my point. I tend to observe things very closely, gather lots of information, and plan my actions carefully. When other people fail to do this and as a result cause harm to others, I might be a bit more reluctant forgive than the average person.

But when someone plans carefully, has good intentions, and makes an honest and unavoidable mistake due to some other factor, I see no reason to hold it against them.

It depends on what was done and who did it. I know people well enough to know who simply made a mistake and who just doesn't give a crap, and who doesn't know any better than a 5 year old. I used to take the blame for everything, but that was mainly because I was raised to believe everything was my fault. After I decided that my parents were full of crap, I concluded that nothing was my fault, because that's what two decades of guilt tripping does to a person. Then I decided that neither extreme was good, so I'm trying to maintain a healthy balance as well as my sanity. I'm struggling a little bit with that at the moment, probably because I have too much crap to deal with, and my family is still self-absorbed, and I still can't get away from them.

Good intentions generally have a lot of weight in my book.