Theory of Mind

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When I am interacting with people in real time I don't have spontaneous ToM.
I have to think about the conversation afterward to understand it better.

The cookie/spaghetti thing doesn't confuse me. I just thought of cookies when the paragraph mentioned cookies, then I thought of spaghetti when the paragraph mentioned spaghetti, so when the question was asked, I answered the object that I most recently thought about, which was the spaghetti. I didn't believe that other people know what I know. I just didn't think about other people at all. I only thought about the cookies and the spaghetti and a little bit about the jar. People with spontaneous ToM would probably think about the people automatically, but I have to on purpose think about those and what they are thinking. I seem to negotiate life fine without thinking much about what other people are thinking.

As stated already, the tests are overly-simplistic. Maybe if someone had asked me this when I was 6, I would've said I expect everyone else to find spaghetti in the cookie jar. Now that I'm a grown-up I've had time to be taught all of the rules and methods on how to find the answer during math and logic classes in school. For me, it's following the rules I was taught and has nothing to do with trying to imagine other humans.

But how about when I start conversations at the end, or get mad when people don't understand me because I operate on the assumption everyone shares my brain? Or how I assume when someone is making a loud noise they're doing it to hurt me because they already know I'm sensitive s. I project all of these things too: like how are they not hurting themselves by turning on a smoothie machine? I proactively freak out for other people assuming they must be in pain or about to meltdown. Opinions also completely escape me as a concept. I don't see myself as having them because I can't recognize them in others. When someone else has a differing opinion, it's hard for me not to be angry because they are choosing to be ignorant, or to spite me, or to make me get really confused about how things work.

I'm not diagnosed with autism at present, but I do have ToM difficulties which have been confirmed by many professionals at different points in my life. I can't personally say if it's crap or not!

To add to this - I think it's interesting that to me the spaghetti question is almost infantile. I would know immediately that he didn't know there was spaghetti in there. However, in real life I'm constantly confused by people. I can not read their faces or understand their social cues sometimes to the point where I just want to cry from frustration. And I'm clearly doing things that bother them that I don't understand (if my problems at work are any indication, which they must be). I don't go on and on about my special interests or anything, I don't know what it is.

Yet you clearly have found a way to get to a place where you can function very well, much better than I have. So maybe the test means nothing.

We were typing the same thing at the same time. Maybe I should just give up trying, then everything would fall into place.

Your explanation helped me understand, thanks.

Maybe it is because I am in research field where what people think socially about each other and non-verbal cues doesn't matter as much as it does in other fields. It still matters, I am sure, but that is mostly outside my awareness. I just do my research and communicate with people about research and weird things that pop into my mind during conversations about research. My father is similar. He doesn't care what other people are thinking and doesn't much of that into account. He just does his research and communicates with colleagues about research. The type of people in research aren't the super social, lots of ToM type. Some are completely neurotypical, but probably just as many are BAP.

Maybe you should stop trying if you get most ToM things wrong while trying.
I never tried to do ToM thing in my life.
I act like myself, and people seem OK with that.
Maybe I will try it when I date.
I hope to date a sugar daddy.
Just kidding, I hope to date someone I like.
Now I just realized that they should like me too.

Yeah, I've just been thinking about it. I have this boss, well I sometimes I have to go into his office and do work while he's in there and I'm constantly trying to read his face because I have to ask him questions and to me it seems like without being able to read his face I can't understand what he's responding. Usually by the time I leave his office, I'm quite shaken. I don't know, it's like some kind of trauma. I do my best to do the work when he's not there, but sometimes I can't avoid it. This is just ONE of the problems.

Ok, so here's another example. I organize these social lunches for our department, just to go out and have fun, but all these personalities are clashing and me and some other people want to stop inviting 2 other people. However, the next lunch is to celebrate someone's birthday and I know she likes those two people. So I go to her and tell her some of us don't want to invite these two people, but I know she likes them and it's her bday party so if she wants me to, I will. She says no, I don't need to. Then she goes BEHIND MY BACK (not in a mean way though), to my friend and asks her if I will "snap her head off" if she asks me to invite those 2 people. I just don't get it!

I'm going to be like you and stop worrying. Sometimes I come home from all this crap and just go into like an emotional coma.

I get very attached to my dogs and cats, when one of them dies I am very sad. They understand me better than humans (in general), and I understand them better than humans too. One of my dogs died about a year ago (I still have one), and whenever I would feel sick or sad she would always come to me and put her head on my lap, and get all worried about me, while none the humans in the room noticed a dang thing lol. In fact I can't imagine my life without a dog and a cat, or at least one or the other (I love them both equally).

I'll admit my answer would probably change depending on how the test was presented. Just using the spaghetti example if it was an oral test I would probably answer spaghetti since it's harder for me to process spoken words so I would lose some of the information. On the other hand I would probably answer cookies if it was written since I could read back over it and think it over a bit better.

So at least for me my ToM depends on the situation I guess.

Theory of Life is not a "thing" you learn like a+b=c ; it's your lifetime of experience telling you how people will respond to you.

For me to have a social encounter was/is an isolated and unusual experience. Others with friends and acquaintances had such encounters constantly.
I'm pretty sure I started out thinking that everyone thought alike (and thought like me).

But found through encounters with others they sometimes thought much differently than I

The NT life uses, not just the FACTS we all know and love, but emotions formed through complex social interaction many of us will never understand. Therefor their Theory of Life will be more complex than ours.

Theory of Life is something that develops in you as you grow and have social encounters, my problem has always been I never felt the rules were meant for me, that I was somehow placed alone, outside society and incidents that included me were few and far between and not counted as everyday lie experiences.

I guess this is one reason I always say being diagnosed when young is better than not. At least you have the possibility of modifying things instead of always having to run into that brick wall because you don't know any other way.

All Baron-Cohen's "research" shows is his own limitations as a researcher. The methodology sucks. He came up with a theory and shaped his "evidence" to fit, as a career building move. Happens all the time in academia, sadly.

To those who buy his theory hook line and sinker, I am tempted to point out the old truism that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

No, it would be strange if someone as high functioning as you couldn't pass that test at age 18.

Theory of mind is delayed in autistics, not absent. The test you're describing is usually passed by NTs at 4-5 years old. While some LFAs never pass it, most higher functioning autistics pass that test by around 8-10 years old. And a few pass that test at the normal age, but fall behind in more advanced ToM tests. (In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I had no delay in first-order ToM.)

The theory of mind stuff applies more to some autistic people than others.
For people who dont' have problems with first-order theory of mind, they probably can't intuit how others have problems with it, and therefore would interpret the theory of mind hypothesis as totally wrong.
But people who do have lots of lapses in first-order theory of mind and fail tests passed by NT four-year-olds would probably interpret the theory of mind hypothesis to be more valid.

Yeah, pretty much all of his studies that have any merit have been done by others using better methodology. For example, there are way better facial emotion recognition tests than the 'Mind in the Eyes test' - which has a weird selection of emotions, has other cues that can be used to guess the answers (every set of female eyes with eye shadow is flirtatious in some way, for example) and is horribly confounded with vocabulary because of the low-frequency emotion words used for answers. The Emotion Multimorph test (where a neutral face slowly morphs into an emotion face, and you indicate as soon as you know which emotion it is) is a far better test, as are the tests made by Paul Ekman.

As for his theories? They suck. For example, he points to tomboyish behaviour in autistic girls as supporting his 'extreme male brain' theory, while ignoring the fact that autistic boys have a similar rate of effeminate behaviour. His description of empathy is imprecise - he keeps commenting about the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy, and then forgetting about it moments later and lumping us in with psychopaths.

I've not been able to fully understand Theory of Mind after some substantial reading. What I do know is that I realised through experience and logic that I was clearly not good at understanding other people or what they are thinking and feeling. I had no idea why and I became somewhat phobic when faced with more complex social situations.

A consequence of that has over time been very civil, polite behaviour (as a social damage control and survival mechanism) terminating in unbearable anxieties and leading to outright rebellion against society and its incomprehensible social codes. I also take every opportunity I can to have conversations with other people to find out what they think about various social situations, which can in turn get me a reputation of being a gossip. This is all clearly the way I compensate for my lack of natural understanding. As a consequence I have developed a fairly good understanding of what makes other people tick, but all of it has been earned the hard way.