Michelle Dawson: preference

Transcript context

…One thing, if I think about your work in general, one thing it’s caused me to do is to see a new bias in how humans make judgment, and that is a bias to underrate atypical kinds of intelligence. I view this as a common thread running through your work. Maybe this is what I’m reading in, rather than anything you’ve said explicitly. But if you look at, say, issues of animal intelligence, there’s a growing body of evidence that animals feel pain, they’re intelligent, they lead social lives, they’re complex in ways maybe we hadn’t understood earlier. Still, a lot of people don’t absorb this knowledge very readily. If you consider Down Syndrome individuals, when I was growing up, there was a common sense of a kind of hopelessness. Now there’s a Down Syndrome individual who’s a lobbyist, people playing roles on TV, and so on. This would not have been expected by most people in the 1970s. Why do you think it is we have this bias to underrate atypical kinds of intelligence, or do you even agree with that characterization? I would be careful about the sort of people in general. I would say that maybe it does seem to be something that if you take the median person, or you do this as a society, sort of collectively, not necessarily as individuals . . . it seems to be something that people are very bad at, to detect abilities and worth in highly atypical individuals. For sure, you see this very much in autism with the whole notion of severity, and this is not defined. There is no workable definition of autism severity. People use that word all the time. They use it to mean that somebody’s had a bad outcome, or that someone is badly behaved, or that somebody performs badly on an IQ test, and so on. There is something bad going on here, and it’s sort of the equation that the more atypical a person is, the worse they must be. They must not be intelligent. There must be something extra wrong, more wrong about their behavior, and so on. Now, this is where I’m very familiar with the whole history of this, and it’s obviously problematic. We don’t — I hope we don’t look at a blind person who is a successful lawyer and assume that he is only very mildly blind or barely blind at all, and then look at a blind person who has a very bad outcome and assume that they must be very severely blind. We do make those kinds of judgments in autism, saying, “The more atypical the person is, the worse they must be in some sense.” That kind of bias has not only harmed a lot of autistic people, it really has impeded research. We do not have a definition for autism severity, but it gets at that idea, that bias — very unhelpful and harmful bias that the more atypical an individual is, the more there must be wrong with them. And autism is almost the paradigmatic case of that happening, so if you want to make a case for that, autism would be where to do it. Are there biases that nonautistic individuals have that autistics might have less, or maybe not at all?…

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