Michelle Dawson: belief

Transcript context

…Now often, in popular discourse, you’ll hear autism or Asperger’s associated with a series of personality traits or features of personality psychology — a kind of introversion or people being nerdy in some regard. In your approach, do you see any connection between personality traits and autism at all? There is a small literature that shows some connection. I think it’s very weak, and I say no, I don’t think autism is about personality. Autism is sort of orthogonal to personality. The two are not related. Whatever relation there is does not . . . arises from some third factor, let’s say. If there is one — and again, the evidence is, I think, very weak connecting autism to personality — so just say that maybe, if there’s something, let’s say that personality in autistics might be more high variance. That would be my totally wild guess, but I don’t think autism itself is about personality. 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?…

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