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

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. 🧵

@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

Thank you for the thread im still processing all of it as it seems to ask some valid questions of responsibility, and collaboration of all of us I guess ?

@greenWhale

Yes, they could have designed the study with those things in mind - and should have, in my view. I've a feeling it would have been a rather different study if it had less simplicity but more clarity around the foundation concepts.

@EVDHmn

Yes, exactly that 🥰

@KatyElphinstone I'm not autistic, but I would have found it very difficult to answer the question too. I would probably have leaned to not wanting to assign blame because I dislike the way our society handles guilt and punishment, but that's not what they asked either. So again; bad test.

@greenWhale

exactly, right? Thanks for answering like this, you've validated my reality

@KatyElphinstone also, sorry for forgetting to boost. I reacted and then forgot. Stupid ADHD.

@KatyElphinstone oh, you're very welcome. I find your posts often very well thought through, so kudos.

@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”.

@KatyElphinstone i think the only differences i would have with you are semantic. in fact the whole problem seems to be one of semantics: what does "blame" mean?

Yes, Janet is "to blame"; her advice directly lead to a death. That doesn't mean that she should be punished! that's a whole other question!

i think the questioners are failing to recognise that "blame" has a variety of different meanings here — as many autists would have happilly pointed out to them…

@greenWhale

Haha no worries and thanks

@fishidwardrobe

Yes! That's a different way of expressing what I think is basically the same problem. What even is 'blame'? In your scenario, you do equate it with being responsible (which I think is fine, too).

And I love the bit "that doesn't mean she should be punished"

Yes, sigh, I wish they had asked the autists to point these things out

@fishidwardrobe

Just realising that what I like most about your take is that you're taking society's ruling that we have to talk about 'blame' (thank you, society) but then you're subverting it to something that actually makes more sense.

@fishidwardrobe

And it's occurring to me that perhaps the participants in the study were doing the same thing...

@KatyElphinstone i'm going to assert my bias here and say that, as allistics, they assumed the meaning of "blame" they intended was the only one in play. "of *course* everyone will understand what we mean"…

@fishidwardrobe

Absolutely. And that was error no. 1

@KatyElphinstone i'm not sure i'm even subverting it (although i'll take that as a compliment!); it's just the standard autistic "okay, what do they *mean* by that? because it's not clear at all…"

@KatyElphinstone Wowww... I appreciate you posting this; I had never read about that study before, and it seems so incredibly full of pitfalls and flaws as to be utterly nonsensical.

So we get in trouble for not assigning blame? Or for assigning blame to someone who didn't have certain knowledge (basically blaming someone for ignorance, which I often do, tbh).

To me, it would be common sense not to swim with jellyfish if you didn't know what they were because certain species of them *are* dangerous. Making assumptions like that (I can swim safely because my friend said so) just seems like something that a lot of people do -- that perhaps we NDs often don't, as we are such information hounds?

I mean everybody else else's mileage might vary but... my first thought about jellyfish would be a certain percentage of them are dangerous, why swim with them at all? So the person who didn't have the knowledge and told their friend it was OK absolutely is at fault in my mind. I actually feel outrage that they did not have all the facts; I think a lot of people move through the world without any facts at all in their brains.

What about the mushroom question? Where does that even come from?! So the person giving the mushrooms to their supposed friend *thought* they were poisonous and gave them anyway? Why? And then they weren't poisonous so they get off the hook?! What the heck? Who would even think to do that? What kind of question even is that?

If that's not emotion about something -- even a situation that's completely unreal -- I don't know what it is. But it's emotion over injustice and incomplete information, not over behavior. These researchers completely overlooked that, and expected the very small cohort of autistic people (so small as to be statistically insignificant re an actual scientific study), got dinged for not having emotions about people. That is so very Neurotypical

@KatyElphinstone The whole "lack of #empathy" idea builds on the #TheoryOfMind idea, which is rotten to the core. The basic paper applying it to #autistics (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith 1985) got the idea from an irredeemably flawed paper that had applied it to CHIMPANZEES[!] (Premack and Woodruff 1978). Both papers are hopelessly confused about what it even MEANS to say that a person — or an animal — has, or does not have, a "theory of mind". Both of these groups of researchers should have gotten clear on their concepts BEFORE conducting any experiments — and since they didn’t, both papers should have been refused publication.

@autistics