Aspie and NT communication patterns

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This article is awesome!! ! Thank you so much for sharing this.

"Are these observations compatible with your experience?[/quote]


Best description of my experience that I've seen. And I'm female, diagnosed only after early retirement from corporate law.

I think part of it is that, when we share information about our interests, we aren't doing it to connect with other people; we're doing it because we like talking about our interests. For NT's, you share your interests as a way to try and make friends; the interest is secondary to the friend-making, so you give and take to show the other person you like them and want to be friendly. For aspies, social interaction is secondary to the interest; most of us don't actually care if you're in the room, or paying attention to our monologue or not. Because of this, we tend to think that NT interests work the same way; that you're talking about it because you like it, not because you want us to share your enthusiasm.

Many thanks everyone for sharing your experiences. This is very helpful.

I am particularly intrigued by the weird NT approach to making new friends.

A major goal of “therapies” for autistic children seems to be to provide tools for living independently, the implicit assumption being that normal humans are capable of living independently. What a load of rubbish! Neurotypical society is a perfect example of living within an elaborate support network. It just happens that autistics require suitably adapted interfaces and protocols to interact with their social environment, and as a result, they run into problems when attempting to interact with the default support network that works for the majority of society.

One consequence is a persistent stereotype that autistics are very poor at collaboration. I think this stereotype is doing a lot of damage to autistics who are being asked to accept this belief as a fact about themselves.

Just like a wheelchair user depends on suitable adaptations in the physical environment created by humans to gain mobility, autistics depends on suitable adaptations of the social environment created by humans to gain access to social support and to be protected from discrimination.

You can learn much more about human behaviour by reading books and research papers from historians, social anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists than by reading material published by autism professionals.

I am currently working on a book that explores the limitations of human cultures and human forms of organisation, as well as the significance of different neurotypes in the context of cultural genetic co-evolution. The latter dimension is barely considered by historians, social anthopologists, and evolutionary biologists.

In my experience Aspies are perfectly capable of collaboration. Collaboration between Aspies is simply not organised according to the culturally prescribed patterns that NTs are accustomed to and expect. NTs are looking in the wrong places and for the wrong kinds of patterns. Hence they have difficulty recognising Aspie collaboration even if it is occurring right under their noses.

The NT cognitive lens has a big blind spot that relates to the dark side of the widely celebrated human capacity for cultural transmission via imitation.

Within a group or society of humans autistics and all others that diverge from the expected norms of conformance are pushed out to the fringe. Those who find themselves on the fringe often end up in a position where they have to interact with multiple different groups in order to survive.

Ironically this positions Aspies as potential mediators between different groups and cultures. Autistics are the ones who will only adopt new beliefs that are supported by tangible evidence and the ones who will unceremoniously discard beliefs that turn out to be incompatible with their personal experiences.

NTs tend to protect and hoard knowledge within their cultural group, whereas Aspies tend to freely share their knowledge and insights with anyone who cares to listen, and especially with those who offer complementary knowledge and insights that can be used to validate or disprove assumptions about how the world works.

I would not be surprised at all if the key functional role of autistic traits in human evolution is related to the validation of knowledge, to the sharing of knowledge and beliefs between competing groups, and to de-escalating the potential for violent conflict. The autistic tendency to share knowledge freely goes hand in hand with a disregard of social hierarchies, authorities, and related in-group boundaries.

At the same time, I also recognise the evolutionary adaptiveness of the NT capacity for unquestioned imitation of behaviour and beliefs that are espoused by a group. Imitation allows new beliefs to spread rapidly within a group, especially beliefs that are transmitted via the primate dominance hierarchy. Over multiple generations group level selection weakens groups with beliefs that are non-adaptive in a given context, and strengthens groups with beliefs that are adaptive in a given context.

NT society learns slowly, and preserves cultural knowledge over the course of generations, whereas autistics largely learn individually, based on the patterns and systems that can be extracted from recent personal experience via basic logical/statistical reasoning. NT learning enables rapid transmission of knowledge between individuals within a group, whereas autistic learning enables rapid adaptation to new physical environments/conditions, and it continuously subjects the beliefs of mainstream society to the sanity check of logical/statistical reasoning.

There is nothing dysfunctional or disordered about the mix of neurotypes found in human societies, and I think it is time for this fact to be recognised by mainstream society.

There's a lot in what you say.

I see a dark irony in the goals of NTs imposing solutions like training autistic people to live independently, given that so many NTs consider social arrangements that centre around interdependence to be the only healthy way for a 'normal' person to live. Independence in that context can be another form of stigma, reinforcing incapability; or perhaps, what is good for the goose, the gander is seen undeserving or incapable of. Sometimes, and particularly for minorities who experience societal oppression, 'help' is the smiling face of control. Of course independence as self-determination and the right to live one's life as one wishes is a good thing. Independence as a way of separating people who need connection (as all humans do) is not so benign..

Or perhaps I got out of bed on the wrong side today..

Yes, the concept of independence in the sense of individual self-determination has nothing to do with independence in the sense of creating or upholding artificial barriers between two or more groups of people.

Autistics probably value individual self-determination higher than the self-determination of groups, whereas for most NTs the opposite is likely to be the case. I can see the difference between the way in which NT parents raise their children and the way we raise our son. The group dynamics that lead to preferential treatment of in-group members lead to NT-style collaboration as well as to NT-style inter-group conflicts and competition. Due to a lack of numbers, autistics don't have a local in-group, and as a result they individually bear the brunt of inter-group competition that is otherwise reserved for groups of "strangers" from a different culture.

The advice "when in Rome do as the Romans do" may work for the occasional collaboration across cultures in NT society, but it is a dangerous recipe for structuring the day to day interactions between a local majority and minority groups. In the latter context the rules of thumb I outline in the OP encourage the NT majority and the Aspie minority to practice mutual tolerance, and to find a suitable half-way mark for interacting.

To date very little has been written about experiences of groups of Aspies that are collaborating successfully, often in a distributed team context, with the help of modern communication technologies.

That all larger groups of humans inevitably end up being organised in a hierarchical structure is slowly being exposed as a myth. Therefore, expecting Aspies to operate within a rigid social hierarchy is a form of systematic discrimination. To understand why the belief in the inevitability of hierarchical structures is so widely held requires an appreciation of psychopathic traits, which roughly seem to be as rare/common as autistic traits, but which are easily propagated via imitation in NT society. There are multiple neurotypes that shape human behaviour, and at this point in time our understanding of the resulting dynamics is very rudimentary.

Frederic Laloux has written an excellent book that explores a dozen of larger organisations that don't operate a hierarchical structure http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/. Non-hierarchical organisations come in different shapes and sizes. There is no simplistic recipe, but all non-hierarchical organisations seem to share a simple "advice process" that I would rate as very autistic friendly. Before making any major decision that affects others in the organisation, a member must seek advice from at least one other member. The advice process:
- solicits potentially relevant context information to consider before arriving at major decisions
- it does not put any pressure on non-experts to offer uninformed opinions, it rather encourages non-experts to provide raw data points that may potentially be helpful
- is a very simple and agile process that puts domain experts in the best position to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information to the best of their understanding (not knowledge!), and to apply their domain expertise and understanding in an optimal way in relation to the community that may be affected by a major decision
- provides a mechanism for people to either proceed swiftly without bureaucratic overhead (as needed allowing them to ignore advice as irrelevant), or to acknowledge the limits of their knowledge and understanding and request a decision by consensus in the absence of any deep expertise within the organisation

Independence is not the same thing as freedom, though the two concepts seem so often to be confused. I can be, and am, independent in the culture in which I live, though I am not free as long as the structure of it remains so fundamentally oppressive to who and what I am. In an extreme example, even Leper colonies functioned as independent communities.. though their independence was based on exclusion and oppression, not their self-determination.

Oppression takes many different forms. Some of them are thoughtfully considered here:

https://mrdevin.files.wordpress.com/200 ... ession.pdf

This is amazing. I can relate 100%

I prefer writing over speaking, I hate HATE HATE small talk (and I'm horrible at attempting one or replying to someone), human behavior is one of my special interests. Human mind and its disorders is one of those special interests I could talk about forever, but also human behavior in general and general psychology. This helped and helps me a lot understand people and their behavior.
I feel like social language is not my native language. My native language is whatever I'm interested in, and education. Sure, I do have light conversations too with my friends, but after a while they get boring and I find myself going back to deep issues.

Regarding the theme of interdependence, isn’t it self-evident that we are all interdependent in different ways? We are so interdependent in fact, and also dependent on technology, that if you take away the hierarchies and the tools, I believe that a lot of people would be unable to adapt.

B19, I don’t understand what you say about separating people who need human connection. Why would we do that?

Hi JBW,

You mentioned the untrue stereotype about people with autism not collaborating well. Stereotypes suck, so would it better to say that those who have difficulty with in-person, group collaboration might collaborate at a distance? Or that shared interests bring lots of diverse people to collaborate together, including people with autism?

I agree that your book about “the significance of different neurotypes in the context of cultural genetic co-evolution” will be extremely unique. I’ve heard some of it mentioned before, about how hyper-focused people have the grit to keep at an invention or experiment for very lengthy periods of time, and so their contributions are invaluable. There’s also the differences in pattern recognition. I wonder what the world would be like without these traits. Not sure I’d want to live in it though.

You also spoke about “protecting knowledge versus sharing.” I think this mostly has to do with competition versus cooperation, trust versus distrust. I’m not a fan of competition when it comes to gaining knowledge, and yet, when people have to invest lots of time and resources, competition and secrecy seem to be essential a lot of the time, just to protect that time and those resources. I don’t think it’s about diversity of any kind.

DataB4, a really stark example happened in New Zealand in the 1980s, when there was a sudden 180 degree change of direction in mental health government policy. Almost overnight, institutions were closed down and the patients (in the blanket guise of "for their own good") were handed minisicule weekly benefit payments so that they could aspire to 'independent lives' in cheap, dilapidated and often exploitative boarding houses. With very limited resources, and no support, they were abandoned by the new wave neoliberal government which simply washed its hands of any responsibility for the vulnerable, the free market was supposed to be both therapy and therapist for those people from that point on.

Can you guess what the outcomes of that policy were?

But we do like our interests. I much prefer knitting alone while watching TV, but it's ok too with others because then we can small talk. Like my new friend that I'm trying to get to know better - he loves fishing. I've always wanted to go fishing, but it's not in my hobbies. I would go fishing with him because I know he enjoys it, but with me my knitting is first. I would go fishing with him because he enjoys it AND because I would like to be in his company - small talking. I'd really like him, though, to also do something I'd like to do too - not knitting, of course, but maybe watch a movie with me that I like or go to some antique stores. It's give and take.

Hi JBW,

Here’s your quote about autistics being on the fringe, not belonging solely to a particular group:
“Ironically this positions Aspies as potential mediators between different groups and cultures. Autistics are the ones who will only adopt new beliefs that are supported by tangible evidence and the ones who will unceremoniously discard beliefs that turn out to be incompatible with their personal experiences.”

Wow, you’re right. It’s the outsiders who shake things up, although you also need incremental change from the inside as well. Sci-fi authors love the outsider’s perspective, too.

Plus, if you want anyone in a group to change their beliefs, they usually have to be willing to converse with an outsider, or at least read what they have to say. Otherwise, a germ of an original idea might just get shot down by the rest of the group. Of course, fighting that groupthink is harder, the more you care about group acceptance.

You wrote: “Autistics probably value individual self-determination higher than the self-determination of groups” although I think that is so dependent on culture and context. It’s a balancing act anyway, and as a result, no one is truly free.

As for the nonhierarchical organizations, I definitely like the concept of always asking for advice from at least one other person, as well as valuing diverse opinions. The best leaders do this. That said, anyone doing well in a truly nonhierarchical structure must be either brilliant at conflict resolution or frequently yielding, no? Otherwise, they would likely be ostracized.

Oh, now I get it. We had the same change in the U.S. That's the semblance of independence, but without the resources and interdependence.

Yes!

Hi DataB4

Yes, individual self-determination and self-determination of groups is a balancing act. Personally my rule of thumb is that avoidance of violence is the key to any kind of progress. No one should be deprived of basic human needs or subjected to physical, emotional, or economic violence based on their beliefs or [non-violent] behaviour.

From experience I would say that mainstream society has too little tolerance and appreciation for divergent thinking or a preoccupation with special interests. Mainstream society expects everyone to "function" within a very narrow bandwidth of "acceptable" behaviour. But over the longer term I am optimistic. People are capable of learning, as can be seen in the progress that has been made [over the course of several decades ...] in relation to other minorities, such as the LGBT communities [ ... and there is further progress to be made].

Non-hierarchical structures based on an advice process create a different kind of group dynamic. Mutual trust in each other is an important prerequisite. I can only speak with authority about the small geographically distributed team that I am part of. We started out by adding one person at a time. The first three people have known each other for many years, and have worked with each other in the past. Now every newcomer goes through a multi-year induction process. The level of mutual trust is validated and grows incrementally. All processes are transparent within the organisation, there is an expectation on everyone to share knowledge freely, and we rely on an advice process rather than bossing people around. Monetary compensation levels are determined democratically, within a narrow band, and there are no special rewards for individual performance – all incentives focus on team performance. The organisation has been designed to be uninteresting for anyone trying to climb a social "ladder". The services provided evolve with the special interests of those who are part of the team.

Conflict can be a positive force in a suitably supportive environment. In our team we have adopted two techniques that have worked well for other organisations:

Waigaya
An embodiment of Soichiro Honda’s cultural style — which is best exemplified by his insistence that Honda employees favor unorthodoxy over imitation — waigaya comes in many forms. At the heart of waigaya is a single concept: paradoxes and disagreements are the essence of continuous improvement. Most companies are afraid of such dualities, but opposing concepts routinely alter the business equation: centralisation versus decentralisation, worker empowerment versus productivity, multinational control versus indigenous autonomy, disruptive innovation versus cannibalisation of existing product lines, and on and on. There are four basic rules for waigaya:
- Everybody is equal in waigaya;
- All ideas must be disputed until they are either proven valid or rejected;
- When a person shares an idea, he or she doesn't own it anymore — it belongs to the group and the group can do with it what it will;
- At the end of waigaya, decisions and responsibilities are generated — a precise list of who is to do what, and by when.

Optimal Conflict
Is a state of mind that improves learning in the context of waigaya. Optimal conflict is defined as:
The persistent experience of some frustration, dilemma, life puzzle, quandary, or personal problem that is perfectly designed to cause us to feel the limits of our current ways of knowing in some sphere of our living that we care about, with sufficient supports so that we are neither overwhelmed by the conflict nor able to escape or diffuse it.
It generates new insights, tangible value, and great products when practiced in a supportive and trusting high performance team environment.