Michelle Dawson: belief

Transcript context

…There are a variety of claims that autistics either have difficulties processing social information or lack certain kinds of social intelligence — why they’re awkward in particular social situations. In your framework, how do you make sense of these claims? And how would you describe or redescribe the phenomena people are talking about? Actually, how autistic people perform in social tasks is high variance. It is very hard to pull out specific deficits where you can’t point out areas where autistics have performed at least as well as typical people on the task. There is an exception, which is the most replicated autistic deficit. I believe there’s one finding in the contrary direction. But all the rest — and there’s a lot, especially for the autism literature — show what is considered an autistic deficit. This is the task of attributing deep mental states to geometric shapes. Usually they are triangles. They will be animated. They sort of move around, and it goes beyond simply attributing agency to the triangles, which autistics can do. You must attribute mental states to them, profound mental states, like they are jealous or they’re flirting. And autistics are very bad at this task. And this has been replicated quite a lot, even at a population-based level, which is not something you necessarily see a lot of. So, is this a social deficit? Autistics are definitely bad at this task. Now, why might that be if you look at things in my own biased way? It may not necessarily be that autistics don’t notice that these interactions between geometric shapes, or among geometric shapes, resemble something social that involves mental states. But they are less likely, and they are not going to totally get rid of the accurate information that these are just freaking triangles. They will only go so far. They are not going to lose that possibly important information that these are just triangles. And you would think that this would quite reasonably produce a bit of caution in assuming that you know quite a lot about their profound mental states. Is the following a fair description? Let’s say that many autistics are taking in more information than would be typical. So sometimes those autistics will end up confused, or they will feel confused or act as if they appear they’re confused. But other times, if they develop procedures for processing that information — rules — they become better at interpreting the information. Maybe they have to become better because they face this more difficult task. So, you will have autistics show unusual mastery of social situations. Even if they appear awkward, they’ll see much more detail than nonautistics would in some cases. But then in other cases, they’ll be more confused. And that’s where this high variance comes from that you mentioned earlier.…

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