Empirical failures of the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind

> Because theory-of-mind tasks rely heavily on “fairly complex language” (San José Cáceres, Keren, Booth, & Happé, 2014, p. 608) and because autism, by diagnostic definition, involves communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Morson, & Grace, 2016), it is unsurprising that autistic participants with communication impairment perform less well than nonautistic participants without communication impairment. And because autistic people vary in their communication impairment (Gernsbacher, Geye, & Ellis Weismer, 2005), it is unsurprising that autistic people vary in their theory-of-mind task performance.

The second definition makes more sense to me since it also comes up in non-autism diagnoses, like personality disorders. They have trouble reliably predicting what other minds would think, but for different reasons.

My personal problem is that, there is some pervasive belief that autistics lack empathy, morals, or gets judged as being narcissistic or worse. These sorts of accidents can happen because signalling doesn't happen, because of the neurological difference, despite the autistic person in question hypothetically following a very ethical code and behaves with full integrity and love and so on but not initially obvious due to the neurological gap. My fear is that shaky concepts, like ascribing lack of theory of mind, could contribute to "othering" and even more misunderstanding.

So in some ways it becomes a semantic argument, theory of mind, why yes minds exist, and autistics may be bad at ascribing mental states to allistic people, but allistic people are bad at ascribing mental states to autistic people (guess you'll have to take this one for granted, but e g or they could replicate the specialised results I mean, like systematise vast bodies of knowledge) so I would say it goes both ways right? So what I mean is the autistics could say allistics lack a theory of mind, because they only understand eachother and not autistics. Except the weight is put on the 1%, by the 99%, rather than a uniting force for humans to understand eachother, it becomes a onesided label of weakness.

edit: I wrote this related comment in another thread as well, explaining why I posted this link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39253047

> If autism is the impaired ability to ascribe mental states

First, autism is not the impaired ability to ascribe mental states. Earlier in your post you more accurately described that as a symptom.

There are attempted theories that get more to what autism "is", that it's a heavier weight on bottom-up processing, processing distinct details more and holistic things less. Another (congruent) idea is related to a "narrow tunnel of attention" and to using more of the brain to attend to a more narrow set of stimuli and thoughts. (You can look up monotropism for more info on this idea.)

Secondly, in my experience and others I've read - autistic individuals seem to often do much better at understanding each other. I mean this in two ways: autists are often better at understanding other autists than they are at understanding neurotypicals, but also in many cases autists may be better at understanding other autists than neurotypicals are at understanding autists.

With this framing you could just as well say neurotypicals lack a theory of mind. Largely we don't do that because there are more neurotypicals than autists.

Of course that's not the full reason and it's not fully symmetrical. If there were a 50/50 split in the population then I think autism would be less of a disability for folks in terms of this theory of mind stuff, but it would still be a significant disability for anyone who struggles with all the other consequences of autism.

But it is still relevant that this "theory of mind" stuff may be a misleading way to talk about it; by default I would expect everyone to have an easier time with a theory of minds like their own. And thinking about it this way also helps inform neurotypicals with autistic loved ones that if they expect their loved one to work hard to understand them, they could do the same.

This definition- of someone failing to understand idioms or figures of speech, sounds more like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek than the meme twitter billionaire.

Is the definition of autism so broad as to have little practical meaning?

Last year I was officially diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Level 1, which closely aligns with what was once categorized as Asperger's Syndrome.

What you're saying is a generalization I would've made at one point, and may very well be true of other people with ASD. It's generally not true for me, and in fact, I feel like I have a preternatural sense for what I think linguists call "pragmatics". I grant that I may have had to reverse-engineer my way to that understanding, since I don't know how more neurotypical people experience them.

A common element to these, is that they are either a bit sideways of a straightforward relationship or many times are being used directly to deceive. Basically, my impression is that autistic people and myself compared to others are by default worse at detecting “liars”.

Most animals on the other hand, don’t try to deceive or control their communication methods in order to hide what they are really thinking. When they are happy, sad, or angry, they consistently display exactly those things. This is why I find it easy to emphasize with animals who have a toddler level of intelligence.

So I don't see the need for the part "and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons." As for the 2nd definition other than finding oneself in awkward situations, e.g. being the last one still at a 'party' not realizing that the host wanted you to leave an hour ago, I haven't really found it to hinder my success. I also don't think it's one thing, black/white, but if I did have to pick one I'd say that the person somehow naturally places their attention on something other than people around them almost all the time starting from a very early age.

Interestingly, all of these also have a cultural aspect. One can be excellent at predicting all these reactions in one culture and be a complete failure at it in a different culture, even though you are the same person.

Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments.

It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output.

You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.

Same goes for people who drift in and out of depression or bipolar disorders. There are mood changes, but with them come changes to risk tolerance and a host of other fundamental things.

At the end of the day, a person's character is in some way biologically defined, so any expression of consciousness must also be affected as well.

I'm not an expert in the philosophy of consciousness or free will or anything, but it's my understanding that most philosophers are compatibilists even if they are physicalists. So it's not necessarily true that physicalism leads to hard determinism.