The "Theory of Mind" Theory of ASD Doesn't Make Se

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The last time I looked, ToM was determined by showing a puppet show. The plot was something to the effect of
1. One puppet putting an apple in a box in front of the other puppet.
2. The other puppet leaves
3. The first puppet moves the apple to under the bed.
4. Then the other puppet returns
5. The chilren are asked where the other puppet will look first for the apple.

Those with ToM say the box (the last place the other puppet saw it. Those without ToM say under the bed cause that is where it is.

Not now that I am older, but as a child I bet I could easily be confused by what it all meant. But that doesnt mean that all of us are delayed in ToM. By definition, we all 1. have social issues; 2. have intense focus on our interests (the GIFT of autism); and 3. significant impairments in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

We are otherwise a diverse lot.

My beef with the "experts" is spreading rumors about our alledged lack of empathy. While some with a dx of ASD may not be empathetic, most I know suffer from too much empathy. This doesnt mean those of us who suffer from too much empathy know the best thing to say or do to bring comfort, but we feel for them.

I more frequently see a lack of empathy from NTs who learn about us from experts that seem to regard us as some alien species that they study, talk about, write about, make theories about, but not only dont bother to get to know us, but disregard what we say about ourselves.
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Well, of course not. You never ask the people with the disorder brains what they think -- they're the ones with the problem, remember? How could they possibly have insight into themsevles? That's why you need professionals to diagnose it. You might as well ask schizophrenics what it's like to be schizophrenic, or the ret*d if they're being treated fairly in their lives. What do they know, autistics, ret*d, bipolar, schizophrenic, they're all 'tards,' what do they know?

[/intense sarcasm]

If you look in medical textbooks about Parkinson's disease, they talk about tremor, rigidity, freezing, and such. But if you look up forums where people with Parkinson's are talking about their experience, they'll be talking about those, but also problems with multi-tasking, slowed cognitive processing, word-finding difficulty and so forth. And sometimes they say the cognitive stuff is worse than they physical symptoms, but the doctors won't pay attention to that.

The same is true with Tourette's. Tics are described as 'random twiches' in most of the professional literature. OTOH, some people with Tourette's describe a sudden flash of memory with an emotional 'sting,' just prior to a tic.

Intersexed people have had body parts routinely cut off in infancy for decades for reasons they can find offensive and wrong.

Why is is like that? Because researchers and other 'experts' pretty much never ask anybody about their internal experience. It's an outside-in description, and incredibly paternalistic. It's why "lack of empathy" hasn't died in 15 years, despite many, including parents, saying, "no," or at least, "not the way you think."

[/rant]

Actually as a child I didn't think people had their own thoughts. I didn't consider how they felt. And I thought my way was right. It still takes me time to realise what people might actually be feeling too. Even when I was dating I didn't think about how my boyfriend would have felt about certain things.
I think the problem is that AS is so broad, so there's going to be people that will have a better theory of mind than others.

do you think you could elaborate on some of the specific ways? really interested.

I have Tourette's. There aren't any serious tics anymore, but with the help of cannabis I eventually realized my head nodding tic(the first tic I had) started when I saw a certain pattern. It was a cartoon picture of Oprah that was used in 3rd grade during Black History Month. It's impossible to describe but somehow I felt like I had to nod my head when I saw that pattern and every time I felt I had to nod my head in the future was when I saw the same pattern. The pattern was so disperse and hard to make out I was only realizing it subconsciously. I also had a coughing tic, which I later figured out was because I saw a commercial as a kid against huffing and thought "huffing" was referring to breathing in too much CO2 versus Oxygen and that I had to force air out after breathing to stay alive. This started going away after a middle school lecture on the dangers of huffing showed me what was really meant, but still took a long time to completely die down afterwards.

Basically Tourette's is OCD, it's just the obsessive aspect is experienced subconsciously. I once had Pure Obsessive Disorder where the compulsive aspect is experienced as having to say things silently in your head in response to other thoughts or to things that happen, usually as a response to disturbing thoughts BUT I never had actual OCD where both obsession and compulsion had a physical manifestation.

I can try ...

The simplest example is like when someone says you have something on your shirt (or asks what is on your shirt) and you look down to see ... and then s/he reaches out and uses a finger to hook your nose, saying "Gotcha!" Or, maybe you have had someone tap you on a shoulder from the far side in order to get you to look to the side where s/he is not ... and then laugh out loud when you nearly "break your neck" looking around to try to figure out what is going on.

Whether allegedly "just for 'fun'" (selfishly or self-centeredly having a laugh at your expense) or to actually be intentionally mean for whatever reason, there are inconsiderate people who take advantage of others in those kinds of ways. But then along with that, there are people whose ego drives them to try/do the same kinds of things with people's minds ... and I think that is the kind of thing you are asking about.

First, they always have an agenda but do not tell you so (or they at least do not specifically identify their agenda). Or, they might tell you (or let you believe) one thing while actually being up to something else or more or whatever. So, and although usually not with someone I already know fairly well (or apart from something like common interactions at a checkout counter), I do *not* answer any questions until I know exactly what the other person has in mind ... and there is at least one answer to your question:

One of the "specific ways" certain people work toward hurting or manipulating others is by asking questions to assess or even just to discover vulnerabilities.

Maybe I can write more on this later. For now, my own mind is preoccupied with thoughts related to an appointment I have with a psychologist in the morning ... and I do not presently know his or her agenda!

The Institute for the Study of the Neurooologically Typical has perceptive artical on ToM that you all should read:

http://isnt.autistics.org/salanne.html

There are many good articles at this site!

Stuff made no sense to me not because i didnt really understand it, but because people showed behaviour that wasnt at all effective. i often wondered why they chose that behaviour when there were alternatives. it took me decades to figure out that people apparantly really werent that smart or aware of it.

When I was a kid, I did have serious problems with tom and had to have things explained to me while other kids seemed to get it without the explaining, although we all got lectured from time to time. As I matured I got better at figuring out tom and empathisizing by thinking more about people. When I was a kid, I didn't want to think about them at all. I had to learn to do it and now I can put myself in others shoes though I slip up sometimes and am not seeing things from someone's else pov. People like me need a bit more counseling in the area but eventually, we can reason things out and understand why someone does what they do. Starting out, it was more difficult to understand others. Without the extra counseling, I might still be just as clueless today as I was then.

Seems Sally-Anne is more related to language.
http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Gernsbac ... odules.pdf

I really don't think "lack of theory of mind" is fundamental to autism. You only need to demonstrate a certain percentage of counterexamples in the autistic polulation to show that it isn't fundamental. Sure, many autistic people do lack theory of mind when compared to neurotypicals, but not all do. Under-developed theory of mind is more like a common side effect of autism that comes about due to abnormality in white matter connectivity. It's not a fundamental defining characteristic.

As someone above said, language is an issue there, as it is with IQ tests. That is, if you give someone with non-standard language aquisition it might render the test meaningless.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the whole ToM thing strikes me as an academics' professional game. IOW, in order to become a famous big-shot you have to come up with a "grand unified theory" that explains a phenomenon. Since in the beginning no one knows much, and there isn't much competition, just take a wild guess what the GUT is, and hope it pans out in the end. "Get in on the ground floor," and hope you're right. And in the mean time keep defending it.

Well said! they often do have trouble understanding each other, its not just a NT vs AS issue.

NT people can be manipulated just as much as AS people, or else why would there be liars and manipulative people? politicians for example, surely some of them are honest and truly want to do good things (or at least I hope so), but I think quite a few of them are pretty good at manipulating people, NTs included.

Shadi

I can only speak for myself but for me it isn't a lack of sensitivity. To me empathy is the sensitivity to feel what is going on in another individual. I turned mine off a long time ago to protect myself because I was too sensitive and this world kept trying to beat it out of me. I closed my heart to the external world and opened it to my internal world where I work and play with other savants like me in a world others don't even realize exists. When this world becomes a little kinder to its own, I may again open my heart to it. It's coming, but until then I'd rather not pound on such an incredibly sensitive and valuable instrument with a sledgehammer

You sound similar to me, BallisticMystic (except I am not a savant, more of an OCD about specific interests type).

It is sometimes difficult to avoid b/c I work full-time. It has been disconcerting for NTs I've worked with that I have valleys of little knowledge about things I do not have interest and peaks of knowledge of within my areas of interest. But I have lived in a place for about 6-mo where this has not been an issue

Research in "empathy" is only considered as it flows from labeled groups to the NT and not from the NT to labeled groups. It has not been a neurodiverse measurement.

The way that Baron-Cohen's Theory of Mind is bandied about in NT commentary (plenty of examples on the net, hundreds) and even occasionally here on Wrong Planet (!) implies in a very derogatory way that a kind of "mindlessness" is an inherent deficiency in anyone on the spectrum.

This is a repugnant, because it tells more about the bias in NT perspective than ASD being and reality.

Suppose we lived in a world that replaced the Theory of ASDs are Missing Parts of Their Minds That NTs Have"
and replaced that narrative with "ASD Perspectiveness Sees Things In A Different Way from Normoconformist-Typicals".

It comes down to a question of perspective. Adherents to Simon Baron-Cohens unproved theory fail or refuse to see that. Many seem to regard his work as if it is gospel truth carved in a stone tablet. He has achieved one thing, undoubtedly - a solid body of effort constructed to add to the dehumanising process that people on the spectrum encounter from career-builders like Baron-Cohen, in the service of their own academic identities, pet theories (however wrong) and career ambitions.

People naively take from Baron-Cohen's bombastic statements to the media that normal people can read other peoples minds and abnormal ASD people can't. Both of these inferences are simply nonsense. Baron-Cohen is a skilled and egotistical self-promoter who rides on the backs of those on the spectrum and adds a lot to the sum of oppression going on in the popular media and discourse. Curiously, you get a lot of this from academics located at Cambridge University in particular. It is really distinctive, even when compared to similar institutions like Oxford University, from whence it rarely occurs. So there is perhaps something about the culture of Cambridge which distinctively encourages and drives this kind of academic egotism. Baron-Cohen seems right at home there, amongst his own tribe.