Why do they say autistic people have lower IQ?

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I never get this. I have a friend who was diagnosed with moderate autism at age 3, but his intelligence is higher than mine. Also people often say people with autism are clever.

Or maybe intellectual intelligence isn't what it means, maybe it means autistic people are lower emotional/social intelligence than Asperger's, or lower intelligence in street smarts or something?

I've always struggled intellectually but I was diagnosed with mild Asperger's.

Help me out here.

You're thinking along the right lines, I reckon. Many people seem to imagine this single thing called "intelligence", and never really stop to think how many different kinds there can be. Or, they assume that if you have one kind of intelligence, you must have all of them in equal measure. I don't do too bad for the "academic" kind of intelligence, but my social and emotional intelligence is way behind - when I do something dumb socially, people seem to act like someone as "clever" as me couldn't ever make that kind of mistake - "how on earth could you not know that!" I sure don't feel "clever" then, whatever my school exam results might suggest.

The stereotypes about autism are a big problem too, I think. Autism is so often shown as one extreme or the other - either children with severe learning impairments or "eccentric" geniuses, depending on the purpose of the message (raising charity money, getting employers interested, making a nail-biting TV drama, or whatever.) I think that is slowly improving, but things which are extreme are often easier for people to remember because they stand out more.

I really wish they would start calling autism a processing difference. It's pretty well established at this point that there is no correlation between dyslexia and IQ. Dyslexics might just need the test questions in a different way, but it isn't their intelligence, it's processing. I feel like autism is almost the same thing, just more emphasis on the social aspects.

In full disclosure, I think IQ tests are meaningless and everyone has their own strengths and challenges. I think we're supposed to be that way to be a balanced community. The test-heavy, cognitively-focused society of now just emphasizes the challenges for us with autism.

Some autistics have high, average,low, IQ scores

Some NT have high, average, low IQ scores

Stereotype

Misconception

I've been told I'm clever and stupid , once by the same person

Joe

Who are "they"?

"They" just means two or more

But it sounds like "they" means everyone

The other thing to figure out is whether "they" have any medical credential or if they are simply lazy trolls on internet forums that want to find something about someone else to pick on.

Maybe it helps those people to feel better about themselves. Perhaps, it's because they're duschbags.

No, these were medical sort of sites.

Maybe we come across as stupid since we don't always get the social rules that are supposed to be common sense?

MOSTLY it is because of the diagnostic criteria from before the DSM-V was released. Intellectual impairment is automatically kicked it over to Autism. As such, the averages were pulled down.

At Kaiser in California the psychologist that does the testing for the behavioral health patients told me the majority of patients with autism that she tested scored in the mentally ret*d range on intelligence tests. She also said I did not qualify for a diagnosis because I was able to have back and forth conversation (basically answering her questions in the interview) which means any adult that comes in without assistance requesting a diagnosis would automatically be discriminated against. Another psychologist at Kaiser told me he knew I did not have autism immediately because I did not mumble with my fist up against my face (and then he demonstrated an offensive stereotype of intellectually disabled people). I was stunned.

Statistics show that the percentage of autistic people with a disorder of intellectual development is higher than the one of non-autistic people. On the other hand, research also suggest that the percentage of autistic people with an above avarage IQ is also higher than the one of non-autistic people. There's of course autistic people with average IQ too, I'd say they are the more numerous, but I think it's possible that we as a whole are more likely to be on one of the extremes than non-autistic people are.

But anyway, this is very speculative, the research on this topic is very likely wrong. Studies have shown during the last ten years that ASD is largely underdiagnosed, most likely between people that have some kind of coping mechanism to hide their disability, and a high intellectual ability is one of those coping mechanism that can "help" us hide our disability (in my case at least it's been completely that way), so there're lots of autistic people, probably with an above average intelligence, who are not being diagnosed, and therefore all the statistics that we have about intelligence between autistic people aren't trust worthy. And also, it's been proven that IQ test are much worse measuring intelligence with autistic people, usually underestimating our intelligence.

Those with classic low functioning autism usually have intellectual disability. I don't think they have aspies in mind when that fact is pointed out. I myself score below average in several areas. Reading and writing is the only area I do well in. And even with that I read and write (type) slower than average.