Narrow mindedness or lack of imagination?

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It must be really difficult spending so much of your time around people who have clearly bigoted opinions. It is difficult sometimes to stand up to people who are bigger than you and when there are more of them than there are of you.

I wonder how these people would behave if your company employed a team of black or Asian people or homosexual and gender neutral or trans people to join your team.

I completely understand why your opinions are the way they are. I have known for a long time that you are heavily influenced by your environment. Its not hard to see that you are surrounded by absolute dinosaurs in your life.

It's not for me or anyone else on this site to change your beliefs but by the same token people on this site are entitled to call you out on things when they feel offended.

And just because you don't feel offended by being treated like an inadequate woman who can't do her own lifting and carrying; is it right that you should expect other women to not feel offended?

I doubt anyone wants you to leave.

People will not agree with you 100%—but this is “life.”

Please do stay.

What do you mean by "narrow minded"? It's common for autists to have "narrow" or "restricted" interests, which just means they have some thing that they are super duper into or passionate about, often to the exclusion of everything else. Greta Thunberg is passionate about the environment. My son is passionate about cats.

To be "narrow minded" is a phrase that means judgmental, intolerant, set in your ways, unwilling to accept other people's ideas or behaviors, etc. It is generally used to describe temperamentally conservative people, while the trait of "open-mindedness" is used to describe more liberal people.

It is true that some autistic people have a certain mental rigidity that makes it difficult to understand that other people are, well, different from themselves. "Accepting that other people have different opinions" was always a goal on my son's IEP. For example, if another student in class talked about having a Christmas tree, he would get upset and insist that they should have a menorah (we're Jewish.) He is a vegetarian (I'm not) and would interrupt the kindergarten teacher's lessons on "what farms do"--the class was going to go to the pumpkin patch--with impassioned speeches about how "farms are stupid because they kill animals." He lost his first friend similarly, after the friend went fishing and ate a fish, and my son became dedicated to (loudly) showing him the errors of his ways.

Mostly I'm proud of my son for having his morals and sticking up for them. He's a passionate person and I love that about him. But he does need to tone it down about 50% so that he doesn't drive people away.

So, is this the same as the kind of conservative moral rigidity that we're referring to if we say something like "grandma is so narrow-minded; she doesn't like gay people"? I guess that's kind of a philosophical question. Most of the conservative people I know well are my biological relatives, so... they're kind of spectrumy. My mother has been diagnosed with ASD and my half-brother (on my dad's side) with asperger's. My dad's obsessed with mechanical, wheeled vehicles, but they're motorcycles and you don't call a biker an autist unless you want to get punched. So yes, they're conservative, and yes, there's a lot of autism, but that might just be coincidence.

It might be better to say that the phrase "narrow minded" is used to refer to a set of political positions associated with Republicans, while "mental rigidity" or "mental inflexibility" is used to refer to people (irrespective of their political opinions) who have trouble with adapting quickly to changes in their routine or struggle with understanding/accepting other people's POVs.

in my experience, AF has its own issues. hate to see you leave us.

in my life i've worn horse blinders when i shouldn't have worn them, and failed to wear them when i should have worn them.

Most people are stubborn about their political views, which is why politics usually cause eruptions between people with different views. They'll argue backwards and forwards, trying to get each party to see it from their point and won't see it from other points of view.

I don't normally go around upsetting people. But I just do it once, and look at what happens. The way I felt angered was self-defence, not strongly believing that everyone will agree with me. I do normally actually think before I post, but I can let my hair down once, can't I? Some opinions are better out in the open.

But the double standard is that if a generally nice-natured Aspie isn't playing the nicey-nice and just wants to get their opinion off their chest, other members attack them passive-aggressively, forgetting how most of you have been treated so poorly by NTs and letting them off because they "don't need to understand us".

I've been treated like crap by NTs, just like probably 99% of people here have. If you want to hear a story, I got bullied by an NT girl at school for years, then when my brother and his friends went after her, she got really upset, like she didn't expect me to have any feelings or any limits. She didn't like being called out on it.
But I suppose it's OK if an NT behaves like that. But when I do it, oh dear, I'm a bad person breaking rules and lacking empathy. It's made me feel so angry.

In fact it's affected my whole day at work today.

I DON'T think it's okay for an NT to act like that. That's an idiotic way of acting.

I'm glad your brother and friends went after the person bullying you.

My brother only defended me once.

Yes I was on about the inability to be able to accept that not everyone is like you. I was just curious if it is related to a lack of imagination to the point where person A cannot imagine how their norrow mindedness or rigidity might make person B feel.

If it is a lack of imagination then it's surely unfair to call someone a bigot or some similar thing when what they really need is help to understand that other people's opinions, beliefs, cultures, gender identities etc are just as valid and as important as anyone else's.

And also if this is the case and if people are struggling then they need help and not ignoring.

The aim of this thread was not to make anyone feel bad. It was to help people see that sometimes it's not just a case of someone being intolerant, sometimes people just need a bit of help to see things from a different angle.

Thank you for your input. It was appreciated.

Yeah that's like avoidance. I don't think it's wrong as such. Some people would just prefer a quiet life. I think it might become a problem if you just avoid every single thing in life.

But isn't that what most NTs are typically like? Can't cope with people who aren't them? This is what I'm trying to say. It's a double standard.

I was raised to have very bigoted beliefs, especially anti-LGBT+ and misogynistic. Most people do have trouble overcoming that. I think doing so requires actively expanding one’s outlook and having enough neuroplasticity to make changing views possible.

No, this is a stereotype that’s based on confirmation bias.

Every person is unique. It is common for all people (ND and NT) to struggle with accepting those they perceive as different, though.

I was brought up in a very racist household. I was actually really dark skinned as a child and would get racially taunted both in the house and in the area I lived. It was a predominantly white area. I think (even though I am white) I was actually the brownest person anyone had ever seen. I'm not bitter about it. It's just bizarre to me that I was treated this way.

I was also like a boy as well so in the those days I was labelled a lesbian. I mean it is really narrow minded of people to behave that way. This was in the 70s and 80s. I used to dream of moving away to be with all kinds of different people and I did. It was like a treat to live in multicultural areas or be in the city where people didn't look at me twice.

I just find it incredible though that in this day and age people still have these bigoted ideas.

That's why I'm struggling with this and wondering if in fact it is more to do with inability to understand rather than out and out bigotry.

I think it could be one or the other and sometimes both, depending on the individual. It is frustrating.

Yeah. Thank you for your help.

Thank you for your help and inputs people.

I'm closing this thread.

I think that open-mindedness is not correlated to AS, but to intelligence and genetic predisposition. It takes intelligence to entertain complex ideas. The predisposition is baked in because a successful tribe needed both xenophobes and variety seekers to strike a healthy balance between keeping out threats to the community and letting in traders and genetic variety.