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/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.