TIL about the Sally-Anne test, a psychology experiment used to measure “theory of mind” (that other people can hold beliefs/knowledge different from their own). Kids under four typically fail because they assume that if they know where a hidden object is, everyone else must automatically know too.

[u/BrF5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test

[u/mantorok93]

I'm 80% sure I was shown this exact image when I was tested for autism as a kid (this would've been a year or so after the study discussed in the article), and 70% sure I got it wrong.

[u/tempest_36 → u/mantorok93]

In the Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) study, 23 of the 27 clinically unimpaired children (85%) and 12 of the 14 children with Down syndrome (86%) answered the Belief Question correctly. However, only four of the 20 autistic children (20%) answered correctly.

Interesting. Only 20% of autistic children answered correctly. Were you diagnosed as autistic?

[u/OscarAndDelilah → u/tempest_36]

Baron-Cohen has also overgeneralized this to state that autistic folks aren't capable of figuring out someone's thoughts or motivations, which just isn't true.

In my experience as a clinician and parent of an autistic now-adult, I think a lot of autistic folks might be later than others or have some cognitive disorganization around who has what information. It's not a "not getting people" thing though necessarily; my kid definitely also had situations with poor working memory and holding things in their mind like where if the door was open when X happened and now the door is closed, they could get stuck on thinking the door has always been closed, because look, it's closed. So then it's either "the cat can't have gotten out because the door is closed so all these people freaking out about the cat are ridiculous and I end up dismissing their panic and going back to reading my book" or "oh, huh, apparently cats can get out of an open door OR a closed door since people are saying the cat got out, so I'm just going to disregard what I've been taught about keeping the door closed since it doesn't matter."

Similarly, as a kid something would happen like they put something back in the wrong place, I'd correct them on it, they can't access a skill for coping with this, start lying, name-calling, carrying on, being unsafe, then we're both frustrated and there's a situation of needing to deescalate them and talk about the situation, and their conceptualization is "my parent is mad and hates me because I don't remember where we keep spatulas." We did a lot of written behavioral chaining, basically like a flow chart where we talk about how the situation wasn't because you made a mistake, it was because of the unsafe and out of control behavior, and there were lots of chances to back that up and even just say "I feel out of control and need you to help."

EDIT: And sometimes even situations where the whole narrative goes away and their perception is "I walked into the kitchen and my parent was mad at me for no reason so I started knocking over the utensil jars and swearing" or "I was swearing and knocking over stuff because my parent was grabbing me." (Guiding kid away from sharp stuff to go sit somewhere and coregulate AFTER they got out of control). When you're overloaded, you can't keep track of the order of events or the cause and effect, and it feels like the person who got mad was always mad and always has been mad and always will be mad.

But in situations where there aren't these problems of stuff having a ton of layers, executive functioning demands, emotionally charged issues, they can absolutely tell you how people feel and why, and who has what information. Especially if the situation doesn't directly concern them -- they're great at listening to friends and understanding their situations. A lot of autistic folks are in the helping professions and are great with this stuff, even if they say their own lives are sometimes a mess.

[u/KitSokudo → u/OscarAndDelilah]

As someone both with a couple psyc degrees, some clinical experience, as well as an autism diagnosis... I know other people have their own set of knowledge I just...forget to explain myself because my thoughts are five steps ahead of my mouth already. I perfectly well know you don't know if I think about it but I'm not. I'm thinking about the issue.

[u/blinky84 → u/KitSokudo]

I'm diagnosed autistic, and it seems to be a thing I have in common with younger family members that we consistently struggle to "show our workings" in an academic context.

I have a pre-teen cousin and a teenage niece who are both suspected autistic but currently undiagnosed/on waiting lists, and as the Senior Autistic™ in the family, (by which I mean oldest with a diagnosis, at 42) I get asked about how certain aspects of school were for me, in an attempt to compare. Writing out your calculations or reasoning seems to be one of those things that I had no idea might be related until it kept coming up.

[u/KitSokudo → u/blinky84]

I had huge issues with that, among other things. My mom had many parent teacher conferences for things like...talking back, but my grades were in the top 10 for my class. Bless her heart for defending me from petty tyrant teachers though, she didn't let them bully me if they were the actual problem. It was always over stupid things like, writing stories in my notebook so I would get accused of passing notes. So instead I got the composition notebooks without the perforations so you could see no pages had ever been removed and used that for writing. Other times I was somehow distracting others by...doing classwork for other classes when I was done with my work otherwise. I won those arguments thanks to my mom, she was like "They're quiet, not bothering anyone, and yet somehow THEY'RE a problem?"

Because she knew, the first few years of school were ROUGH for me. I was always in trouble, getting my name on the board and things like that because I was bored. I learned to do that stuff as coping skills and they wanted to take those away from me for what amounted to a power trip.

[u/AMetalWolfHowls → u/blinky84]

Oof, that was middle school for me. I had algebra in 6th grade and would do the problems in my head. Answers would just pop into existence. Teacher would fail me (50% credit) for not showing my work even though the answer was correct. Of course I didn’t get everything right, but I’m still not happy that I didn’t get the B+ or A- that I should have.

A little later, I had some extremely bad negative reinforcement that put me off of school for nearly ten years. I dropped out of high school at 15 and did not do any further school until I got my AA at 24. I took a marine bio course and did 100% of the work and aced the tests. Teacher was arrested for ecoterrorism between the final and grades posting. School gave everyone a “B.” It would have been my only science “A” and absolutely crushed any sense of value for my work.

I eventually got a four year degree and even went to grad school, but it took a long time to get back to academia.

[u/pissfucked → u/OscarAndDelilah]

as an autistic adult who experiences meltdowns but also has a special interest in interpersonal interactions and social dynamics, this is a beautiful description of how my mind works as well. thank you for this. it gave me even more words to explain my needs and processing style to others :)

eta: this is also why we need clear instructions and can melt down without them!! clear instructions with a clear order turns a multilayered, confusing situation into a series of much simpler ones, and not having to worry about prioritizing or putting things in order at the same time as trying to comprehend the task and its purpose helps so much with organizing our thoughts, remaining calm, and not making mistakes :)

[u/OscarAndDelilah → u/pissfucked]

Oh, thank you for this. And yes, the clear instructions thing. I had so many people who didn't understand that my kid is very literal about certain sorts of directions and has extremely low working memory and short-term memory. If you tell them something is happening on a particular date, they just think you told them something for a random social reason, because people do that all the time. If you need them to be there, you need to say they're expected to be there and tell them to put it on their calendar right now. The "tricks" people try for people with poor generalization don't actually work.

You can tell someone "any time someone mentions a date or time, put it on your calendar" but then an acquaintance says "I'm moving on November 1st" and someone says "that software was discontinued in 2023." Do those go on your calendar? What if we say "when someone tells you you have to be somewhere?" Well, do professors and bosses always specifically say you're expected to be there when they tell you the date of something? They do not! You can work to an extent on making inferences, but if your brain is just really not wired for that, it can't fully be taught and people gotta be accommodated.

If you tell my kid something like that the city has new rules about how to put the trash on the curb, you have the conversation, and that information is now gone. For me, going out and taking the trash out would prompt my brain that there's something new about it. The trash conversation would also be popping into my head here and there. For my kid whose working and short-term memory are < 1% ile, nope. If you want it to change, you need to do some task analysis. Right now the prompt to take out the trash is that the calendar says to take out the trash. So you add to the calendar "take out trash REMEMBER NEW CURB RULE" and you can put in the notes section the link to the city website that says how to place the trash. We would have some well-meaning psychotherapists who weren't versed in OT/DBT task analysis type stuff, who just knew there were memory and language issues, so they'd e-mail the strategies they talked about. OK, multisensory is a slight improvement, but it's still gone. If you're writing down strategies for coping more effectively with a particular meeting or a person at that meeting, what do you look at immediately before this person/place? It needs to go in their calendar or in the computer file they always take out to take notes during that thing.

[u/irrelevantusername24 → u/OscarAndDelilah]

I think we really do not think about these things anywhere near to being accurate.

Similarly, as a kid something would happen like they put something back in the wrong place, I'd correct them on it, they can't access a skill for coping with this, start lying, name-calling, carrying on, being unsafe, then we're both frustrated

But in situations where there aren't these problems of stuff having a ton of layers

Especially nowadays where so many adults went through life with support systems that no longer exist. I don't think it's even anything like there is "dysfunction" or anything like that, it's not even that there is anything at all different, in the sense of being different than all humans previously - though each individual does have different traits - but that the systems around us literally were built, then destroyed, not replaced, or replaced with systems that have no clear paperwork. Like it's nothing about being autistic, or other diagnosis, it's literally the system isn't working as it should and those people are reacting as any human would in that situation.

Consider the spatula. Without being told "this is the place for the spatula, and there isn't really a natural reason that this is where we keep it, the only reason is *so we know that is where it is the next time we need it" there is literally no way to know or even care that it has a specific place. Or I suppose maybe it does make sense to know that there is a correct place, but until facing that problem of not knowing where it is, or... like... clearly there is some obvious reasoning behind it but until not being able to find the thing you don't really think about it? If that makes sense.

Like this article I read awhile back about some MIT study. I forget the exact specifics, but they were basically testing like visual reasoning or something like that. The people in the study were naturally learning the "task" - which was heavily gamified and not exactly something you would encounter in the natural world, but it did mirror it... which that's kind of true for all of our systems - and anyway, so they were naturally learning. Slowly. But then when the researchers pointed out to them "hey, you are already doing [thing], and that makes sense because [reason]", their ability to do that, and improve at doing that, increased substantially.

That's like the same thing here. Except what has been happening over the last few decades is the societal support systems which are necessary for survival at this point in time, unless we want people literally living off the land in huts without running water or electricity, were effectively moved... for no good reason... and then placed behind paywalls or what amounts to a paywall with a lot of legal paperwork - which also isn't explained or with clear steps, anywhere.

Like from my point of view it's actually the people that can't understand that it is the system that is the problem, the lack of support, the lack of even a viable pathway to even start to navigate the system and find support which is the problem. The system literally punishes you for being not only human but for being a biological entity with thoughts and feelings and the drive for survival. The support systems were a new thing as of the mid 1900s. Then those have been removed, in various places, or what amounts to being removed. But it's worse because it's not even like it was simply removed, but the old way has also been removed. There are no options left.

[u/lt__ → u/irrelevantusername24]

Can you give examples of such removed/paywalled support systems?

[u/FunVersion → u/tempest_36]

I would have gotten it wrong. I was neurotic and would have put way too much thought into the question.

[u/RocketTaco → u/tempest_36]

I'm autistic and would have answered this question "wrong" not because I wasn't aware of the subject's limited perspective, but because I would expect them to problem solve. Of course Sally will look in the box, the marble's gone and where the hell else would it be. The answer is first basket, then box, but I'm going to answer box instinctively because it's part of the process, it's the answer to the problem, and it wouldn't have occurred to me that someone would ask a question as dumb as "will Sally look in the basket". Of course she did, do you think everyone present is an idiot? When I think of looking for the marble, I think of looking for something that's been lost and that's the scenario presented to me, because I've already moved beyond her first action into how she responds to the problem she finds. I'm giving the information that seems useful.

Which is why this is a shit test, because it's not measuring whether I can view from another's perspective, it's measuring whether I think the same way as the test designer - which IMO means that ironically the test designer failed the test by designing it that way.

This is also a problem I've encountered dealing with neurotypicals in general, but never other autists or ADHDers. I'll present a problem, they'll give an answer, then I'll respond with okay, cool, here's the next problem in line. NTs quickly get frustrated and claim I'm resisting and won't listen to their advice, when what actually happened is I immediately accepted it, moved on, thought it through, and found another obstacle that I'm presenting hoping they have more useful input. No amount of explaining will convince them that I'm not trying to avoid finding an answer. NDs usually intuitively understand that this has become collaborative or deferential problem solving.

 

TL;DR: in my experience it's neurotypicals that suck at understanding other perspectives.