Have you wondered where the claim that autistic people lack empathy came from?

@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.

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.

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#Autism #Empathy #Neurodiversity #Psychology #TheoryofMind #ActuallyAutistic

@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.

@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 more

@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.

@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...

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.

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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.

@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”.

@greenWhale @KatyElphinstone

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.

@gwenthefops

I so agree about knowing the edge of your knowledge. At least a little humility...

@sinvega

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 "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.

@KatyElphinstone she logically is responsible for her friends death because jellyfish are deadly and this is well known

Autistic people, after all, are known for preferring logic (I certainly do).

And we’re also known for thinking outside the box – meaning that if we’re forced to make false decisions based on faulty assumptions, then we are quite likely to make the ‘wrong’ choice.

Interested to hear others’ thoughts on this! And I’ll be looking for another influential study to look closely at.

I really enjoy analyzing things!

End of thread. 🧵

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
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Thing is, when I as an Autistic blame someone or something, I’m just identifying the causal chain of events - there’s nothing “moral,” about it.
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It’s a “moral,” matter when you’re planning to punish who or whatever caused the problem. As a lifelong God’s fool sort of Autistic, that isn’t automatic, in fact I try to never punish anyone for anything.
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So “blame,” is a word that means different things to different neurotypes, making these tests faulty from the start. We’re suppose to lack empathy because for them, blaming Sally means hurting Sally, which it doesn’t for me.
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Worse, their version includes punishment, and they think that’s Human Nature and true for everyone so they don’t even try to compensate for that confound.
🤨
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#ND #ActuallyAutistic #Autism @autistics

@punishmenthurts @KatyElphinstone @autistics

I never had a diagnosis, but I can relate so much on this.

I always have to remind me that people doesn't like a rational analysis of what's happening if they are involved, and that it makes me come out as judgmental even if I have zero intentions of that.

@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”.