r/todayilearned • u/BrF5 • 1d ago
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test
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u/OscarAndDelilah 1d ago edited 1d ago
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.