Picking Up Social Situations Intuitively....

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Yes. I thought about this today and came to the same conclusion. She lacks the Theory of Mind to know what will make a person want to give her a ball / play with her. An NT intuitively knows that they have to make themselves attractive enough to play with. An NT child, seeing self without ball, would probably pick a ball that flew a bit too far, bring it quickly back to the kid/s that threw it, and take it from there, continue playing with them. Or offer to throw the ball so someone who's practising catching will promptly agree. Or whatever. In my native Spanish this is called being an "ËNTERING" person. It means that you have the instinctive knowledge of how to enter someone's heart / the heart of a group, for people to want you in. If there's one thing I'm not (nor is my autistic father nor was my autistic grandmother) is ENTERING.

I agree.

Now that I'm older though I have experiences I know that a more political method to resolving a conflict will yield better results but I still find it impossible to implement it. It just isn't instinctual behavior for me to hold back my true feelings. My instinct is to be vocal and openly angry about what I perceive as unfair treatment even if it creates backlash.

The ToM isn't all or nothing for me. I have it sometimes but I don't instinctively maintain it so I'm bound to slip up at some point. My own emotions and thoughts override the ToM in the moment.

OP> where does the "intuitive" part come in

The intuitive part comes in because they don't have to be AWARE of what detail they are reacting to in order to make (or have made already) snap decisions about people. Now, in our case, we may not even be aware of those things, or we may be aware of many more things, or we may not be able to put it in the appropriate social context in many different ways.

Velociraptor> The entirety of our neurodiversity may not be hardwired. Some of it may be the equivalent of software programs functioning in our brains.

For sure. It used to be thought that no neurons can regenerate. Now it's known that we do continue to build neurons throughout our lives, some people more than others. I'm studying what is for me a challenging math class right now. That will cause connections to grow in my brain as I struggle and succeed. If I only stayed in my comfort zone and passively read or watched tv, this wouldn't happen as much or at all. Some things aren't going to change ever, but we can't know what those are, generally.

About pecking orders, oh boy, I had no clue about those, or the need to save face for people, or indeed what would be face-saving. Now some in this thread are saying as a good little sheep you're supposed to save face for those above and not worry about those below, in fact rather join in the contempt. Yeah, I suppose that's right for much of society that remains at the junior high or middle school level of emotional development. (Seriously.)

I used to have the same problem, that's why I started taking Prozac a couple years ago. Now I'm able to control the emotions surging naturally from my egalitarian logic and behave the way my higher ups in the pecking order like it. Note: You don't need to control your true emotions with those below you in the pecking order (meaning: those who need you more than you need them). The further below you a person is, the more you are allowed (and expected) to be yourself with them.

I think I can because I night club alot or used to. As long as there isn't any flashing lights because I blank out.

I already take antidepressants and they don't stop me from being angry. I guess my best strategy then is to avoid needing a**holes more than they need me.

Now you're starting to see the world as NTs see it. That's exactly their whole goal in life. To be as high up as possible in the hens place so they're as little dumped on as possible. My Psychologist told me this.

I guess I'm NT then. Actually I don't care about lording my authority over anyone, I just want personal dignity. If someone decides to treat me unfairly I'll tell them to f*ck themselves and quit. I refuse to deal with BS.

I agree us aspies cop enough as it is. Just BS small talk/bullying attitudes, passive aggressive - it's got nothing to with a fault we have.

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think there is more going on than what the "experts" say. Especially because nowadays, I have reasonable social skills, but I can still walk into a group gathering...a singles event, a party where I don´t really know anyone, a bar, etc.- and I can still be excluded and ignored, like that girl in the video. (This is why I just stopped trying). I think some things are maybe just so intuitive that they can´t be explained...NTs may be barely aware of what´s happening themselves! An example of this is that when I´ve sometimes directed musical theater pieces in schools, where I was working with non-professional actors- and they had to interact with each other by means of an acting text- often the non-experienced actors would suddenly have bizarre, nondescript (limp) body language, or their voices would go monotone. They would just stare at their partner´s eyes, but otherwise they seemed to have no idea what it is they actually DO in real life. I knew better what they do than even they did! At the time, I was shocked that they hadn´t taken the time to observe and analyze people in real life. I had thought everybody did this? But I think to them, it comes so naturally they don´t have to think at all.

Yes, I have noticed this too! I also don´t do this; in fact, the whole idea of flirting...come to think of it, the general "dating game"- just feels unnatural to me. I remember about 1 year ago- before I knew anything about AS- watching a girl, who must have been about 13 or 14- flirt with a boy. She knew just what to do, just when to smile, how to toss her head the right way. I was amazed that it was so natural for her, and not for me...whereas, here I am, an "experienced" adult! Once again, I think that has nothing to do with "skills", it´s just innate. And I can even tell what looks right...I can see that what she is doing is "right", and I can even direct shows based on whether or not the acting "looks right"...but try to do it myself? I feel helpless when it comes to flirting in real life, though I could imitate it in an acting sketch- with a memorized text, cues, etc.

I have this experience too quite often..(wow, it´s great to know I´m not alone!) I wonder what causes it? Is it an intuitive reaction? Do I have the "wrong" body language...is my face too blank? Is it just because I am small? Sometimes, I wish I had the answers to some of these questions...

That´s an interesting thought, and it hadn´t even occurred to me before. I guess it´s partly this "emotional management" they talk about. I notice I have this problem, even now to some extent. I can´t "swallow down my emotions", if they are strong enough, to be "socially correct". Even with something as trivial as going to the grocery store: if they don´t have a particular item I especially wanted to buy, I can´t just smile at the salesperson and say "okay, thank you anyway", the way I notice others do. If I feel frustrated, I act...well...frustrated. I hate it sometimes when I do this, but I just can´t seem to help it. As for ingratiating myself socially, to gain someone´s esteem...this I also just can´t do. I think it´s just not natural for us. In fact, I think the best way to sum everything up, for me, is to just say that I don´t have a "social brain". Much of my work in gaining "social skills" in the past were just basically very concentrated efforts at learning how to change my perspective.

What you call not having a "social brain" is actually so. People are born with a predisposition for social connection. Autistics have a very low social predisposition (to varying degrees). A professor in my country wrote a wonderful book about it. His basic idea is that we (he doesn't call us Autistics but Outcasts and Rebels) are born more drawn by our inner reality than the need for connection, while most people are born more attuned to social connection than to their inner truth. I suppose you can find literature on the subject in English too.

Such an interesting thread - sometimes I'm amazed that we don't have a 'psychology' sub forum for this. Maybe I should ask?

So true, I'd go further and say that Aspies also confuse the symptoms. So do the therapists, researchers and people writing about AS. On the video of the rejected girl, it's absolutely *vital* to realise that events do not have clean beginnings and ends, there are no neat and tidy discrete events in life, although it would be convenient if there were. What the video shows is an effect of everything the girl has experienced to now, not just the cause of her current and future experience.



That happens to me to, although it has got much less as I've got older. I always assumed it was a male dominance thing as it's always some, usually young, male who does it. Looks straight at you, knows you're there but isn't going to move. It's the law of the jungle! Now I'm older I guess the young males don't even consider me worth competing with.

People who are playing those games do not stop at pushing you off the pavement. They will carry this into the rest of there lives. Some people appear to me to be so selfish, so unaware of others, it's like they must be drugged or something. Yet this doesn't prevent them being popular and even succesful! We must really annoy them with our inability to understand these social status games.



That's more or less it! Just learning this made sense of so much paradox and confusion I found when observing the interractions of others. People don't suddenly transorm into something else the day they leave school, though. They carry on exactly the same and have built a world based on the same principles.

I like the idea of transcending the pecking order entirely. Choose not to play a game that you can never win. If we truly are the most intelligent species on earth, the peak of evolution, it's about time we proved it by not behaving like chickens and apes! There's a difference between mass behavior and individuals. The masses are always little more than apes in fancy clothes. Individually, we can be much more than this.



I'm sure most of them aren't! Thats what 'intuitive' means, almost by definition. What interests me is that even if you ask them directly, they cannot explain it and will even lie to avoid confronting the issue. Reminds me of an android that's been programmed to *think* it's fully conscious but is not.

However, 'intuitive' and 'natural' are totally different concepts. Just because it's intuitive, does not mean it's natural. One thing I suspect is that we have to be MORE NT/less individual in overpopulated situations. It's a function in our brains that takes over by default, rather than intuition, to make living in impersonal, crowded communities possible. In quiter, smaller communities, even NT's look upon the behaviour of large metropolis citizens as totally crazy. Quietness and introversion are not the outcast traits that they have become today. Not that long ago a metropolis had a population of 50,000!! ! Sure there were big old cities such as Rome that may have exceeded a million, but then the insane behaviour of it's leaders and citizens and eventual collapse prove my point I imagine it was NT heaven and AS hell.....

Anyway... I don't think we can ever pick up on social situations intuitevley (I can't even spell it, let alone do it). What we do is pick up on it analytically which is far slower for one, looks a bit odd to the NT's and , best of all, provides answers that are not wrong so much as 'different' from what the NT's are 'intuiting'. I also have the experience several have mentioned of picking up on things about people that are eventually proved absolutely accurate yet totally different to what the NT's are perceiving.

Last edited by ManErg on 13 Feb 2009, 7:46 am, edited 3 times in total.

Within an excellent post:

But *why* would we want to change it? I'd rather avoid the pecking game than learn how to play it.



As an unfeasably broad generalisation, geeks invent stuff, but the uber-NT jocks at the top of the pecking order decide how it's used. Which may be why we have the technology to create paradise on earth, yet somehow it just never gets done. And how long has the highly technological world got left?