Are Autistic people more/less likely to be bad/evil?

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Azureth
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12 Jun 2017, 4:11 am

By that I mean, as for those with Asperger's one assumes that they aren't as likely to influenced by the masses whether it be for good or bad. But do you think being autistic would make someone less likely to be, say, a ruthless dictator, tyrant, one who rules with an iron fist or carries out horrific deeds, very racist/prejudice etc. or do you think it isn't that much of a factor?

As a side-note, are there any infamous rulers that are known for their brutality, evil, etc. that were or were thought to have been autistic?



EzraS
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12 Jun 2017, 8:15 am

I'm sure it's been surmised that Hitler had Aspergers.

I've been surrounded by many people with autism my whole life. They've been the good and the bad but seldom the ugly.



sun.flower
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12 Jun 2017, 8:25 am

Those with autism are far more likely to be victims of bad behavior than perpetrators.



sun.flower
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12 Jun 2017, 8:26 am

Adolf Hitler’s personality was investigated posthumously through the use of an informant
version of the Coolidge Axis II Inventory (CATI), which is designed for the assessment of personality,
clinical, and neuropsychological disorders. Five academic Hitler historians completed the CATI. The
overall mean inter-rater correlation was moderately high for all 38 CATI scales’ T scores (median r =
.72). On Axis I, the highest mean T scores across raters were Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (76),
Psychotic Thinking (73) and Schizophrenia (69). On Axis II, the highest mean T scores were Paranoid
Personality Disorder (78), Antisocial Personality Disorder (78), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (77),
and Sadistic Personality Disorder (76).



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12 Jun 2017, 9:27 am

Hitler had a rather extreme reaction to being refused admission to art school in 1907.

After that rejection, things went downhill. He blamed the Jews for that rejection.

I would say much of his pathology can be summed up in one word: "scapegoating."



SaveFerris
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12 Jun 2017, 9:39 am

Azureth wrote:
By that I mean, as for those with Asperger's one assumes that they aren't as likely to influenced by the masses whether it be for good or bad. But do you think being autistic would make someone less likely to be, say, a ruthless dictator, tyrant, one who rules with an iron fist or carries out horrific deeds, very racist/prejudice etc. or do you think it isn't that much of a factor?


No facts to back it up but I don't think ASD is a factor at all , I think a personality disorder is usually the deciding factor but even then it's not always the case


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12 Jun 2017, 9:44 am

There can never be "documented" proof that people with autism are "more/less likely to be bad/evil." I wouldn't even bother with such studies. They don't get to the essence of autistic people at all. They just come to generalized conclusions.

I believe it depends on the individual. Some autistic people are evil; others are nice.



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12 Jun 2017, 10:18 am

Jeffery Dahmar was thought to be autistic by medical experts because he meets 11 out of 12 in the criteria for his childhood but he was also a sociopath and he had a GAF of a 5 because he was a danger to others due to his sadistic and cannibalism and he would dissemble his victims and store their body parts in his apartment.

If an autistic person is violent or acts like a sociopath in anyway, I always think they have more going on than just autism.


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kraftiekortie
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12 Jun 2017, 10:44 am

^^ Yes, I would definitely agree with what you wrote.



Scorpius14
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12 Jun 2017, 10:57 am

If there was such thing as the force, I would join the dark side

If there was a reactor explosion that gave people like me super powers all over the world, I would likely be a supervillain

In relation to the ideology that hitler was radicalised by the evils that he was exposed to during his life, I can compare myself that I have to blame someone for my misfortune, which will be everyone, no one has helped me in life, except for the 1 or 2 who put a roof over my head but also still don't understand my perception of the world and the fact I will never fit in. I don't have the same extremist views because its not one race I hate, it's a role reversal and I don't have the tools or ability to fight back.



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12 Jun 2017, 12:17 pm

I don't really think autism makes someone inherently evil. Autistic people tend to be honest, and I'd think they would be less likely to lie and cheat, though misunderstanding of social rules and lack of empathy could get some into trouble. It depends a lot on the individual's personality.



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12 Jun 2017, 12:30 pm

Autistic traits/different social ways probably make it harder in most cases to carry out the evil intent and easier to be a victim.

Autism can be a factor in how evil is formed and carried out. Case in point Adam Lanza whose special interest was school shootings. He kept detailed records of school shootings going back to the 1800's.

Morbid find suggests murder-obsessed gunman Adam Lanza plotted Newtown, Conn.'s Sandy Hook massacre for years

Quote:
What investigators found was a chilling spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide that required a special printer, a document that contained Lanza’s obsessive, extensive research — in nine-point font — about mass murders of the past, and even attempted murders.

“We were told (Lanza) had around 500 people on this sheet,” a law enforcement veteran told me Saturday night. “Names and the number of people killed and the weapons that were used, even the precise make and model of the weapons. It had to have taken years. It sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research.”


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sun.flower
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12 Jun 2017, 12:33 pm

via Karla McLaren on Autism sensitivity,
painful hypersensitivity
The following are normal everyday behaviors among neurotypicals: lying about their feelings; avoiding sensitive subjects that are glaringly obvious; leaving important words unsaid; pretending to like things they don’t like; pretending they’re not feeling an emotion that they’re clearly feeling; using language to hide, obscure, and skirt crucial issues; attacking people who frighten them without ever realizing they’re full of fear; stopping all forward progress on a project without ever realizing they’re full of anger and grief; and claiming that they are being rational when huge steamy clouds of emotion are pouring out of them. Neurotypicals are often emotionally exhausting.

And here’s the big ugly secret: Neurotypical behavior isn’t empathic — in fact, it’s often counter-empathic and filled with noise, static, emotional absurdity, and confusion.

But even amidst all of this static and confusion, many of my autistic friends were achingly, scathingly aware of the social world around them. I mean hilariously, dead-on aware, if you would only listen to them. In fact, they were as uncommonly aware of the social world as some of my wildly empathic friends were. What I saw in these people was not a lack of empathy, but a difficulty in dealing with an often-overwhelming sensory onslaught, from the outside world, from their struggle to decipher neurotypical social absurdities, and from inside their own brains. (empaths on the autism spectrum part 1)
My autistic friends were incredibly sensitive to sounds (especially very quiet sounds that many neurotypicals can ignore), colors, patterns, vibrations, scents, the wind, movement (their own and that of the people around them), the feeling of their clothing, the sound of their own hair and their breathing, food, touch, numbers, animals, social space, social behavior, electronics, the movement of traffic, the movement of trees and birds, ideas, music, juxtapositions between voice and body movements, the bizarre, emotion-masking signaling neurotypicals call “normal behavior” … many of my friends were struggling to stand upright in turbulent and unmanageable currents of incoming stimuli that could not be stopped, bargained with, ignored, moderated, or organized.

In short, my autistic friends were overwhelmingly, intensely, unremittingly, outrageously empathic — not merely in relation to emotions and social cues, but to every possible aspect of their environment.
Being on the Spectrum is a very difficult thing when the world around you — with its constant noise, confusion, emotional inconsistency, and demands for attention — is built for neurotypicals who aren’t aware that everything is engineered for their comfort.
The lack of awareness neurotypicals have — their blind acceptance of their world “the way it is,” without concern for the needs of others — is called privilege in sociology. For example, a young white man who lives in Northern California in 2011 and states that racism is no longer a problem is speaking from the ignorance of racial privilege. He may not be cruel or inherently racist himself, but from his social location, he cannot see or experience any direct racism; therefore, he mistakenly infers that racism doesn’t exist. Privilege is a form of mind-blindness that is, sadly, absolutely common in neurotypicals.
Neurotypical privilege relies upon the same unaware and insufficient reasoning as racial privilege does: So if I don’t experience the sound of the dryer next door as being extremely loud, then it shouldn’t bother you, and you certainly shouldn’t start rocking, flapping your hands, hitting yourself, or pulling out strands of your hair in order to deal with the aural overload. Or, if you know two people who have been fighting for months on end, and you clearly understand all of the issues that they’ve been ignoring, then you should never, ever speak aloud about it, because that’s not how we do things! It’s rude! Wake up and act like a neurotypical!

What? Ouch! This “normal” social behavior — this insensitive and emotionally incongruent behavior — is only deemed normal because neurotypicals agree that it is. Neurotypical social behavior isn’t objectively correct or better than any other way …. in fact, neurotypical functioning is tremendously problematic, and as I wrote above, it is often deeply unempathic as well.
Neurotypicals who learn to manage in the social world aren’t displaying signs of superior mind-sight, functioning mirror neurons, or a healthy dose of empathy. Neurotypicals — for whom mind-blindness and a lack of empathy are common, everyday behaviors — learn to manage because the neurotypical social world was created by them and for them.



kraftiekortie
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12 Jun 2017, 12:38 pm

In my life, I have known autistic people who lack empathy, and "neurotypical" people who were quite empathetic.



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12 Jun 2017, 2:00 pm

Autistic people are no more or less evil than NTs, but autistic people are more likely to become victims of violence. And when you're bullied, trolled, and hated for things you harmlessly enjoy just because they're "cringey" your whole life, then is it really any wonder that it would mess a even an NT person up in the head?

Anyway, I believe Hitler had paranoid schizophrenia and not Asperger's. Not that people with schizophrenia are all dangerous, either. Most aren't



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12 Jun 2017, 2:30 pm

I myself am just bad to the bone. Bbbbbbb-ad! :lol:

But seriously folks.....

Autism spectrumites at every level of functioning make incompetent criminals, and make very good victims.

We tend to be trusting and naive, and targets and not perps of crime.