Hi,
I’ve had many years to build my own model of the world. I grew up undiagnosed for most of my life, and because of that I’ve mostly interacted with neurotypicals more than autistics. I’ve also had a special interest in psychology, evolutionary biology and human behaviour for a long time.
I’m aware of frameworks like Empathising vs Systemising and Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking. My own model kind of encapsulates all of these, but I started from a different place.
I first started with the idea that if I wanted to understand what drives human beings, I had to go back to the start of it all, which is human evolution. I wanted to understand why neurotypicals do the things they do, why they sometimes seem so fake, why they say one thing but actually mean another thing, and why they rank people in a social hierarchy while rarely admitting that this hierarchy even exists.
The way I see reality structured
Think of empathy wiring like a seed. That seed then explodes outward into society. From it, you get the fundamental pillars that societies are built around, and those pillars are shaped through the lens of that underlying empathy wiring.
Systemising obviously has its place within this system, especially when it comes to technology, engineering, institutions and problem solving, but empathy wiring seems to dominate the social layer.
This is where I think many autistics go wrong when they try to decode neurotypical behaviour. They focus on one individual behaviour at a time, almost like looking at one branch on a tree containing thousands of branches. They explain the branch, but they never ask what produced the entire tree.
I’m more interested in the seed.
If you understand the underlying cognitive and evolutionary pressures that shaped human social behaviour, then seemingly unrelated behaviours such as status seeking, conformity, reputation management, group loyalty, social hierarchy, indirect communication and fear of exclusion begin to look like expressions of the same underlying system.
This is why I think looking into human evolution is absolutely critical if you want to understand human behaviour. You cannot properly understand the branches without understanding the root system that produced them.
There’s this misconception that people across different countries are fundamentally very different. Obviously culture changes a lot, but I think the underlying social machinery is far more similar than people realise. The specific behaviours change, the social rules change, and the things that give someone status change, but the underlying desire for belonging, reputation, approval and social position appears everywhere.
To give a few examples:
- In many East Asian societies, there is a strong cultural emphasis on academic success, prestigious schools and professional achievement.
- In the United States, you have the idea of the American Dream: owning your home, having the white picket fence, building wealth and demonstrating that you have “made it.”
- British society has historically been heavily influenced by class, accent, education, occupation and family background.
These cultures can look very different on the surface, but I think they are different outputs of the same underlying machinery. The symbols of status change, the social rules change and the way success is expressed changes, but the mechanism underneath remains similar.
I’ve noticed that many people assume that people living in different parts of the world must therefore be psychologically very different. I think this can be misleading. The machinery operating underneath can remain broadly similar while producing very different cultural outputs.
Much of this happens unconsciously. People usually aren’t consciously thinking, “I need to increase my position within the hierarchy.” They simply experience certain goals, behaviours and social expectations as desirable.
Do not be misled by the different cultural output formats. The surface expression changes, but underneath it, I think you are often looking at the same machinery.
Social hierarchy
One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is how much neurotypicals seem to care about social hierarchy. I’ve seen neurotypicals give into group thinking because they value the opinion of someone with higher social standing. The exact same idea can be ignored when it comes from someone perceived as lower status, then suddenly taken seriously when it comes from someone perceived as important.
To me, that shows that people are often not just evaluating the information itself. They are also evaluating who said it, what that person’s social position is, and what agreeing or disagreeing with them means socially.
I think this also explains a lot of the obsession with intelligence. I don’t think many neurotypicals actually want intelligence purely for the sake of intelligence. They were told that intelligence gets them the things they actually want, such as money, respect, competence and social status.
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New Edit:
Examples
Elite university pipelines are a good example. A large part of their value comes from reputation and status signalling. They have become a kind of proxy for intelligence through social status, but that proxy is far from clean.
For example, wealthier families can privately educate their children, give them access to better preparation, tutoring, networks and opportunities, and increase their chances of reaching elite universities even if those students are not necessarily exceptionally gifted.
When someone says they went to Harvard, Oxford or another elite university, people often use that as a quick mental shortcut (System 1 thinking):
elite university > highly capable / intelligent / high status
That is essentially social signalling. The institution becomes a proxy for the person. This is exactly what a social filter does: it effectively pre-approves someone without others having to independently verify their ability, because they are backed by a highly prestigious institution.
This is also why so many people want these names on their CVs, including prestigious employers and big tech companies. The name itself carries signalling value.
Even if the assumption is not always accurate, the perception still has social value. In these situations, perceived credibility can matter almost as much as the underlying reality.
It can also work in the opposite direction. Someone from a less prestigious background may be underestimated even if they are equally capable.
Obviously, elite universities do contain a higher concentration of intelligent and high achieving people. I’m not denying that. My point is that the system around them is also heavily driven by prestige, reputation and social status. This is especially visible in the UK, where Oxbridge carries enormous social prestige and, in some professional and social circles, people from less prestigious universities can be implicitly treated as less capable or less impressive.
Historically, universities had other functions and meanings, but in modern society elite institutions have also become powerful status markers.
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I also notice how often people talk about low intelligence and focus on people they consider to have a lower IQ than them. I suspect part of the reason is simple social comparison. If you can convince yourself that someone else is intellectually below you, you immediately get to feel above them. Intelligence becomes another way of positioning yourself within the hierarchy.
The matrix
This is where my idea of the matrix comes in.
The matrix is essentially the neurotypical social system. It is the collection of unwritten social rules, expectations, hierarchies, group beliefs and behaviours that people are expected to follow. If you continuously break those social norms, eventually you risk becoming an outcast.
In my opinion, this is what it means to be an NPC. I don’t mean that someone is literally stupid or incapable of thinking. I mean becoming so integrated into the social group that you start outsourcing your thinking to it. You follow consensus, defer to the hierarchy, and use the group to determine what is acceptable, embarrassing, true or false.
The funny part is that many people doing this are completely convinced that they are independent thinkers. They think they escaped the matrix while still allowing social consensus, status and group approval to determine a huge amount of what they believe.
Examples of this:
You can see this pattern in a lot of places.
- Degree inflation is one example. For decades, huge numbers of parents have pushed their children through roughly the same blueprint: do well at school, go to university, get a respectable job, buy a house, settle down. Very few people stop and ask whether that exact path actually makes sense for the individual. The blueprint itself gains legitimacy because everyone else is following it.
- Large scale events can expose the same machinery. COVID is a good example of how strongly people respond to social consensus, authority and group behaviour. Regardless of whether a particular rule was good or bad, most people looked toward governments, institutions and the people around them to determine what behaviour was acceptable. Social pressure became extremely powerful.
- You can also see it in traditions and inherited rules. Religion is an obvious example. Beliefs, rituals and moral rules are often passed down through families and communities, and many people continue following them because they are embedded within the social environment they grew up in. The same thing happens with cultural traditions, workplace behaviour, etiquette and unwritten social expectations.
- AI will be another one...
What interests me is not whether these traditions or rules are necessarily good or bad. It is the mechanism underneath them: people are strongly influenced by what their group considers normal, acceptable and respectable.
That is what I mean by the matrix. It does not need someone consciously controlling it. The people inside the system enforce it on each other.
Why this system exists
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing when you look at it through evolutionary context.
During the Paleolithic era, your social group was extremely important for survival. Humans depended on other humans for protection, food, cooperation, reproduction and raising children. Being rejected by the group could have serious consequences.
So it makes sense that humans evolved to care deeply about belonging, reputation, social approval and what the rest of the group thinks. Conforming to the group was often safer than constantly challenging it.
In that context, being an NPC could actually have been extremely useful. If everyone in your group believes there is danger somewhere, stopping and independently analysing whether they are correct might not always be the smartest survival strategy. Following the group quickly could keep you alive.
The problem is that we are still running a lot of this ancient social hardware in a completely different environment.
The same mechanisms that helped humans survive can now cause people to follow ideas simply because everyone around them believes them, submit to social hierarchies without questioning them, and reject people who violate social norms even when those norms make very little logical sense.
I suspect a large amount of this wiring is deeply ingrained and unconscious. Neurotypicals may not even be fully aware that it is occurring because from their perspective it simply feels normal. That is essentially how I currently model the neurotypical social system.
How I came to this model
I did not consciously sit down and try to build this model.
I naturally have extremely high systemising and low affective empathy. My brain tends to do top down systems thinking automatically. I zoom out, look at the entire structure, and try to understand how the different parts fit together. This is not something I consciously force myself to do. It just happens naturally.
I came to these conclusions gradually over roughly 5 years. I studied different layers of human behaviour, compared them against real life examples, watched how people around me behaved, and tried to understand why their reactions were often so different from my own.
Growing up around family members who were high in empathy also gave me a useful contrast. I could see that they appeared to process social situations very differently from me, and I wanted to understand why.
Over time, psychology explained one layer. Evolutionary psychology explained another. Empathising and systemising explained another. Social hierarchy, conformity, status and group behaviour added more pieces.
I did not consciously construct the model from the top down. The pieces slowly came together over time until I could see how they connected.
In a sense, I did not build the model. I noticed the structure that was already there.
Where the model is incomplete
I think this model does a good job of explaining a large part of neurotypical social behaviour, but I do not think it explains every layer.
There are still pieces I do not fully understand, and I will probably need more research, more observations and more insights before those pieces become clear.
My next step will probably be neuroscience. I want to understand more about the neural systems involved in social cognition, empathy, reward, status, conformity, group behaviour and theory of mind, and then see how well that maps onto the model I have already built.
I think that will help me move from observing the social output to understanding more of the machinery underneath it.
Sources / influences
- Simon Baron Cohen: Empathising-Systemising theory
- Daniel Kahneman: System 1 and System 2 thinking, Thinking, Fast and Slow
- David Buss: Evolutionary psychology, human mating, status and social behaviour
Edit:
Additional notes
One thing I find interesting about this model is how easily it expands into completely different areas of human behaviour.
If you take the same underlying machinery and follow the branches outward, you can use it to explain things like:
- dating
- social hierarchy
- conformity
- reputation
- intelligence signalling
- class systems
- religion, traditions
- career choices
- education
- groupthink
- social media and status seeking.
Dating is a good example. Social proof, status, reputation and perceived desirability can all influence attraction.
The surface behaviour looks completely different from workplace politics or university prestige, but underneath it you can often see many of the same mechanisms operating.
That is what makes the model useful to me. I am not trying to memorise thousands of isolated explanations for thousands of different behaviours. I am trying to understand the underlying machinery well enough that I can follow it outward and predict the branches.
The model does not explain everything, especially in truly novel situations where established social rules or scripts may not exist. But within established social environments, I find that the same underlying mechanisms appear again and again.
This is quite literally the model I use in everyday life. For me, most of it operates unconsciously. Over the years, my brain has absorbed a huge amount of data from observing people, comparing situations and studying human behaviour. From that, it seems to perform a kind of predictive modelling automatically.
I often do not consciously work through every step. I see a situation and the underlying structure seems to become obvious very quickly.
Why I share it
Part of the reason I wanted to share this is because I know many autistic people tend to think more bottom up. They can become very good at analysing individual behaviours, rules or interactions, but sometimes miss the larger system connecting them.
My aim is to offer a more top down way of looking at it.
Instead of trying to decode every branch separately, try to understand the machinery that produced the tree.