Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?
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Autistic participants were more likely than non-autistic participants to say Sally was to blame, despite her good intentions.
This was interpreted as evidence of faulty moral reasoning or reduced empathy.
But that conclusion rests on three errors of logic built into the task itself, and not on evidence that autistic people care less about others.
️@KatyElphinstone Faulty moral reasoning of the person who told the story and/or created the test.
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Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?
The “jellyfish” study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01-autistic-mind.html
In the fictional scenario given to participants, Sally tells a friend it’s safe to swim with jellyfish. She believes they’re harmless. The friend is stung and dies.
️ #Autism #Empathy #Neurodiversity #Psychology #TheoryofMind #ActuallyAutistic
@KatyElphinstone Also, some autistics have learned to not show feelings whatsoever. I met someone who had no feelings in their tone and reacted as if he had no feelings on anything.
Asking him why he had no feelings, he told me it was out of a need to survive, for whenever he did have feelings, his father would grab him by the neck, lift him into the air and hold him against a wall.
Yeah, we got some PTSD there.
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@EVDHmn @farah @KatyElphinstone
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still cool, but it almost never froze. Sun today.
@punishmenthurts @farah @KatyElphinstone
We had cold températures, probably not cold for a season pro like you. I had to get creative and essentially layer my flat in air gapped microclimates, 40 degrees or 3/4 isn’t all that warm inside when its -10 outside -
@punishmenthurts @farah @KatyElphinstone
We had cold températures, probably not cold for a season pro like you. I had to get creative and essentially layer my flat in air gapped microclimates, 40 degrees or 3/4 isn’t all that warm inside when its -10 outside@punishmenthurts @farah @KatyElphinstone
By the Time I was done my appartment kind of looked like a scene out of dexter with all the plastic and duct tape . -
@punishmenthurts @farah @KatyElphinstone
We had cold températures, probably not cold for a season pro like you. I had to get creative and essentially layer my flat in air gapped microclimates, 40 degrees or 3/4 isn’t all that warm inside when its -10 outside@EVDHmn @farah @KatyElphinstone
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oh, I’m on the coast, I don’t think my hummingbird feeder froze since November. I don’t think I’ve seen -10 this winter. -
@punishmenthurts @farah @KatyElphinstone
By the Time I was done my appartment kind of looked like a scene out of dexter with all the plastic and duct tape . -
Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?
The “jellyfish” study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01-autistic-mind.html
In the fictional scenario given to participants, Sally tells a friend it’s safe to swim with jellyfish. She believes they’re harmless. The friend is stung and dies.
️ #Autism #Empathy #Neurodiversity #Psychology #TheoryofMind #ActuallyAutistic
@KatyElphinstone I have rarely read an article so loaded with bad faith and bad assumptions. Wow. I can't even get to the points you're discussing over that.
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Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?
The “jellyfish” study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01-autistic-mind.html
In the fictional scenario given to participants, Sally tells a friend it’s safe to swim with jellyfish. She believes they’re harmless. The friend is stung and dies.
️ #Autism #Empathy #Neurodiversity #Psychology #TheoryofMind #ActuallyAutistic
@KatyElphinstone what was the result from the control set with allistics (non-autistic people)?
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@KatyElphinstone I have rarely read an article so loaded with bad faith and bad assumptions. Wow. I can't even get to the points you're discussing over that.
@KatyElphinstone Like, none of this relates to Theory of Mind. At all.
"This shows that their judgments rely more on the outcome of the incident than on an understanding of the person's intentions"
Yes, two things about that.
a) People judge way more based on outcomes than intentions. It's a lesson driven home by every "you're so weird" I heard throughout my life. It takes real effort for folk to take intentions on board, and they're not usually willing to expend that effort.
And b) it's...
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Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?
The “jellyfish” study (2011) was influential in this, as it concluded that autistic people lacked Theory of Mind & capacity for moral reasoning.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-01-autistic-mind.html
In the fictional scenario given to participants, Sally tells a friend it’s safe to swim with jellyfish. She believes they’re harmless. The friend is stung and dies.
️ #Autism #Empathy #Neurodiversity #Psychology #TheoryofMind #ActuallyAutistic
@KatyElphinstone
Sounds like running the question past a philosopher would have cleared up a few things. -
@KatyElphinstone Like, none of this relates to Theory of Mind. At all.
"This shows that their judgments rely more on the outcome of the incident than on an understanding of the person's intentions"
Yes, two things about that.
a) People judge way more based on outcomes than intentions. It's a lesson driven home by every "you're so weird" I heard throughout my life. It takes real effort for folk to take intentions on board, and they're not usually willing to expend that effort.
And b) it's...
@KatyElphinstone ... also how law works. At least that's the idea. Germany doesn't use so much case law (it still does), so the general idea is that first, the facts determine what the crime is, and THEN intentions influence whether the punishment is more or less severe than the baseline.
So how can one turn into a moral failing what the very foundation of our rule of law is supposedly built upon?
It boggles the mind.
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@KatyElphinstone ... also how law works. At least that's the idea. Germany doesn't use so much case law (it still does), so the general idea is that first, the facts determine what the crime is, and THEN intentions influence whether the punishment is more or less severe than the baseline.
So how can one turn into a moral failing what the very foundation of our rule of law is supposedly built upon?
It boggles the mind.
@KatyElphinstone "those with a milder form of autism such as Asperger's syndrome, often develop compensatory mechanisms to deal with their difficulties in understanding other people's thoughts. The details of these mechanisms are unknown"
The mechanisms are "unknown"? They're observation and deduction, forced on by having to figure out your illogical shit with no help from you and no manual.
What a twerp. They're supposed to be a scientist, and have this shit down.
Cthulhu weeps, that's bad.
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@sinvega@mas.to @KatyElphinstone@mas.to I started with a message lower in the thread. Once I read the context, my immediate reaction was to say, out loud, "wtf, she shouldn't be asserting things if she doesn't know"
Like yeah, I think she is responsible, because her lack of double checking is what led to the outcome. Does that mean I want something to be done? Hell no! At most this is a cautionary tale of why you should always know the edge of your knowledge, nothing moreI so agree about knowing the edge of your knowledge. At least a little humility...
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@KatyElphinstone I'm autistic. I'm empathtic enough that someone else's misery makes me feel miserable. When I say I want everyone to be ok, not only do I care about the well being of others, it also would improve my own quality of life. The pain and suffering of other people hurts me.
I'm the same.
This thread is actually a byproduct out of an article I'm writing on autistic empathy. I'm nearly done but these are the kinds of things that will go into it.
(And when finished I'll be asking for people's thoughts / feedback!)
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@KatyElphinstone I have explicitly argued more than once that we have two different concepts that are routinely conflated in broader society, excuses and reasons.
An excuse is an ethical justification for a thing.
A reason is a logical justification for a thing.If I acknowledged that theft is logically justified by lack of wealth, whether that entails an excuse is an entirely other argument to be had.
I wouldn't have necessarily coded this bright line division as autistic but...
Ooh beautifully put!! I'm bookmarking your post so I don't forget.
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Within this frame, prioritizing outcomes over intentions is coded as a moral error...
A lack of understanding about the situation and about other people.
Even though, for the person who’s now dead, intentions make very little difference, while the outcome has been quite important to them.
️Have you encountered this analysis? It feels like it's relevant:
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@KatyElphinstone from my point of view, you're 100% correct in your take. They leave out a lot of information because they want to isolate the issue, but they forget that they need to do so in a way that doesn't make the test overly vague. It would have been simply resolved by defining 'blame' or by explicitly stating that punishment is part of assigning blame here.
Our culture generally tends to conflate punishment, deterrence, & retribution, with all sorts of nasty results. I think Katy's analysis above neatly unpacks that.
ETA: Oh, I forgot a fourth one: restraint. It does makes a certain amount of sense to keep some offenders off the street. But if that's your primary method of managing offenses...you've got the wrong end of the stick.
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@KatyElphinstone your analysis of the situation is spot on I think. I really vibe with the blame vs responsibility distinction. Sally is inherently responsible having decided to make her opinion known which influenced her friend’s action. The friend is also responsible for her own actions. It wouldn’t even occur to me to look for blame in a situation like this unless I was forced to.
Before I read the thread, with only the information in the first two posts, my impression of this test was that it trivializes a fairly complex moral conundrum.
I feel this is the case for a lot of assessment type studies that have hypothetical scenarios and questionnaires like this. The questions always leave enormous elephants in the room, begging the reply “it depends”.
Thanks for this. My way of answering a lot of conundrums is "that depends"
Or even... "That depends on how we define [...]"
So much that my kids would often answer for me lol
Also I wanted to say sorry for changing the name from Sally to Janet. I realised there were a bunch of jellyfish studies, and in the one with the swimming the name given is Janet. Making it look like you're responding randomly with a different name. My sincere apologies for that!
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Our culture generally tends to conflate punishment, deterrence, & retribution, with all sorts of nasty results. I think Katy's analysis above neatly unpacks that.
ETA: Oh, I forgot a fourth one: restraint. It does makes a certain amount of sense to keep some offenders off the street. But if that's your primary method of managing offenses...you've got the wrong end of the stick.
Exactly
this.And while the deterrence makes sense and is useful, the other things don't and aren't.
Ah... except perhaps for the purpose of maintaining power structures and the status quo
️(I'm laughing as I write this, and thinking, "ah, no wonder people don't like us" - especially privileged ones who like their position)
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I so agree about knowing the edge of your knowledge. At least a little humility...
@KatyElphinstone @gwenthefops @sinvega And that's something I feel immediately distances me from normies: most people like a confident idiot. They feel safe. Meanwhile, such behaviour makes all my alarm bells ring.
Sometimes I wonder if it helps or makes it worse, that I work in a field where knowing what you don't know is perhaps the most important skill. I've used to run job interviews explicitly rigged so that the applicant can't know the answers to some questions. If you bullshit, you're out. I can't trust you.
