Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including those who otherwise require less support, face severe difficulties in everyday social interactions. Research in this area has primarily focused on identifying the cognitive and neurological differences that contribute to these social impairments, but social interaction by definition involves more than one person and social difficulties may arise not just from people with ASD themselves, but also from the perceptions, judgments, and social decisions made by those around them. Here, across three studies, we find that first impressions of individuals with ASD made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls, but also are associated with reduced intentions to pursue social interaction. These patterns are remarkably robust, occur within seconds, do not change with increased exposure, and persist across both child and adult age groups. However, these biases disappear when impressions are based on conversational content lacking audio-visual cues, suggesting that style, not substance, drives negative impressions of ASD. Collectively, these findings advocate for a broader perspective of social difficulties in ASD that considers both the individual’s impairments and the biases of potential social partners.
I don’t get it. Why do people make these judgements and how are they so fast?
I think it’s just something brains do unconsciously and automatically. You ever “feel” something in your gut? You just “know” something, or it “feels like something is off”? It can’t be logically justified, they just feel like something is different about us. Brains hate that.
What pisses me off about it is people not revisiting these snap judgements.
The human brain evolved for group dynamics and social hierarchy over truth and logical thinking, it’s instinctual. In the same way you recoil at a hot stove, they judge your social value in an instant. Then, they have to justify why they don’t like you so they don’t feel like they’re a bad person. This is why NTs think NDs are “rude” or “strange.” They literally make up shit to make themselves feel better for hating you.
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My theory on this is that they expect the social routine to be, well, routine. Societies develop certain unwritten rules for social interactions reinforced through the routines and observations thereof.
So when someone doesn’t fit neatly into the routine and there’s no immediately obvious indication of why (child, someone from outside the culture), their instinct is to disengage, and often assign the lack of following of routine to rudeness. As much as the prevalence of the spectrum has gotten increased attention in recent years, there’s still a piss poor awareness of what social interactions are like for people on the spectrum. The sort of caricatures of people with autism the media tends to present don’t help either.
It’s because it isn’t a judgement so much as a reflex, instantly processed from environmental cues in the same way that you can tell that someone was just in the room without actually being aware that it came from registering and collating numerous tiny changes. If it were a conscious judgement, then we could simply ask for the reasoning.
We communicate a lot with our environment, and it shapes and defines us in ways that bypass conscious awareness, and then blends in with our sense of self anyway - a self that is patchwork and fuzzy and intermittent, but has a little circuit that makes it think it’s a smooth continuum. We don’t recognise faces because we see the world and it contains faces. We recognise faces because there’s a specialised subsystem that recognises faces and if that subsystem doesn’t function then it doesn’t matter that we can see them - and if a magic knife cut that subsystem out of my head I would not feel any change. Maybe.
Like many things our brains evolved on the way to sapience, social reflexes aren’t necessarily functional in a way that is beneficial to our current circumstances, and wouldn’t necessarily present in the same way in the context they arose in. There are way more of us, we interact shallowly and briefly all the time, we’re all atomised and alone and afraid and held in the jaws of Capital.
People can learn elsewise. It isn’t really in their interests under capitalism, but they might accidentally believe the wrong parts of the liberalism stuff, or stumble across a shared humanity, or just be kinda cool like that.
And it’s important to remember that there isn’t really such a thing as a (edit: perfectly) neurotypical person, just like there’s no average person, and I don’t know what I’m talking about.