*I’m* watching.

So, yeah. It’s not that I don’t know that other people form opinions of me based on my actions. It’s that I form opinions of me based on my actions, so I act in ways I think are appropriate. If other people might judge me differently, well, okay. So?

I am not acting to put on a show. I am acting to achieve the results I want.

“Yet another hypothesis could be: they don’t consider a positive increase in reputation to be valuable if it originates from a lie.”

“But I imagine there are still additional hypotheses.”

Stwart Jenssen
Findrxonline.net

David Drumlin: I know you must think this is all very unfair. Maybe that’s an understatement. What you don’t know is I agree. I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line, where the kind of idealism you showed at the hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.
Ellie Arroway: Funny, I’ve always believed that the world is what we make of it.

How odd is it that social norms inhibit us so strongly, and yet they are nothing but our construction? To me it’s all a strong motivation for dismantling dogma, ritual, and the rest of it, especially when one considers how many taboos are nearly universal among humans.

But on a personal level, all one needs is a desire to understand the reasoning behind one’s own behavior, and a modicum of introspective skill, from there it is up to us to decide how open to be—or not.

I am who I am, seen or unseen…

Maybe we just aren’t as hypocritical and adept at subterfuge as a group but the real flaw in the study is that they are judging us as a group when we are as individual as any other segment of the population.

I think that it isn’t as if the person’s psycho- or sociopathic, that they’re just incapable of caring about such things. The impulse to be social is strong. That’s why autistics can sometimes unload on people, rather than filtering and giving and taking. They’re simply doing what nature programs us all to do: make connections with others.

I would say that the problem is that folks like us don’t synchronize well, at least not as an intuitive, natural skill. It’s a learned behavior, a sort of persona gained over years of experience at our not so successful efforts at reaching out to others. Depending on the degree of severity, the asynchrony might be so severe as to completely discourage most social interaction, and that asynchrony is compounded by the fact that people thereafter fail to gain the nuanced, detailed experience that gains a person insight into others and their motivations.

But whether or not it’s that severe, I would say that a person like me depends less on the unreliable signal of synchrony from outside, and the give and take, and more on a kind of remote, offline sort of theory of what behavior that is proper, right, equitable and fair is.

So, to my mind, the explanation of the result might very well be that whatever amount that the autistic person has decided upon relies not on the unreliable signal of synchrony, but their own internal pragmatic, ethical, and moral compasses of decision-making.

In other words, the neurological and experiential bias for an autistic is to think for themselves, and remain true to whatever combination of individual principles and sensibilities they use, and resist adulteration of that judgment without sound, rational understanding as to why.

Which is to say that simply having another person standing in the room is not going to encourage them to give more than they’ve already given them, because they’re pleasing their own self-consistent sense of what’s right and wrong, rather than responding to that of others. That is not to pass judgment on others, but simply to say that a neurotypical and an autistic are taking different pathways on the road to making the same decision, and the character of the different pathway that the autistic uses alters how others can influence their decision making.

There is some evidence for this. See the following paper (on moral psychology):
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1665934

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/09/atheism-as-mental-deviance/

I suspect most people make the mistaken assumption that they can read other people’s emotional states accurately/reliably, but when you happen to think more generically in the first place you’re obviously more likely to correctly guess (by chance) another person’s emotional state. Thinking of it in terms of the Dunning-Kruger effect it could be that autistic spectrum disorders may be too aware of what other people could potentially be thinking/feeling, and their increased awareness leads to second guessing their conclusions, decreasing their rate of success.

But what’s bugging me is the description that it is a problem with their theory of mind: what is wrong with thinking my private behavior ought to match my public behavior? Or the idea that I ought to be honest to both myself and others. Whether I gave a lot or a little, I would want others to know the conclusion I drew and my reasoning. I could even justify giving less when watched, as I tend to hate attention, (even the most basic gestures of generosity often elicit a small amount of praise—which I typically dislike). I tend to have a good reputation but very much of it is owed to my genuine honesty, whether positive or negative to my social standing. (Though I find public pity just as discomforting as public praise, and I try to avoid boasting and glooming equally.)

Yet another hypothesis could be: they don’t consider a positive increase in reputation to be valuable if it originates from a lie.

But I imagine there are still additional hypotheses.