I was shown a picture of lots of different activities at a seaside. I was asked describe what was happening in the picture. So I described the individual activities. The fact that I did that instead of describing the larger picture as ‘vacation’ is evidence that im autistic. But those people could have lived at the coast, it might just be a saturday for them … right?
So the mark of not being autistic, is to draw assumptions based on partial evidence? I joke, but also I dont really joke.
I was at a training course for work and they were talking about the difference between big picture thinking and evidence based thinking - as though those two have no crossover. They show us a picture of stone henge and tell us to say what we notice about it. I get picked first: “it looks like the grass has recently been cut”. Everyone laughs, its probably an odd thing to point out. Next person: “its summer solstice”, very good, well done. But is it?? Why? “The sky is red”. Yeah okay, I saw stonehenge and thought summer too, but nothing in the picture shows that. So I looked for evidence of summer - the grass is yellowed, parched? No its only a patch, the rest is quite dark and the stones appear to be damp, the yellow is probably some dead grass from having been cut - yes, the grass is short around the bottom of the stones and there seems to be some grass blades powdered to them, the grass has been cut, there is no evidence of it being solstice. Red sky and damp, its probably dawn.
Back to the test, the theory is that someone with autism cant assess the outer context, or the big picture, in the first instance of thought (<200ms). But actually maybe that is what is happening to me if im dismissing the context as not proven, its coming later in my processing of what I am looking at 🤔 either way, whether the test works or not, those people could just live at the coast 😤
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I mean it’s important to distinguish between actual scientific tests and random managerial bullshit and wasting a day on “training”.
The scientific test, assuming this is real science, and not more random crap found on a website, will just be based on observation. People with autism tend describe individual pictures while neurotypicals tend to impose a narrative on the whole collection.
There’s no good or bad here, they’re different ways of describing the world. You don’t win if you’re more autistic or neurotypical or whatever.
On the other hand training days like you’re describing are always a complete waste of time. The aim is to turn up, do the minimal amount of engagement to make it look like you’re a team player, and then just try to fit in with everyone else. There’s is no point in wasting time thinking about course materials. The guy who wrote them was just bullshiting.
If it makes you feel better, if it was actually sunrise on summer solstice at Stonehenge, there would have probably been people in the pictures. I’ve heard it gets busy.
if it was actually sunrise on summer solstice at Stonehenge, there would have probably been people in the pictures
Haha I actually said this to the person 😅 I dated a girl who used to go to the party their to get fucked on shrooms and recharge her rocks 😂
Autism or not, without any establishing priors, you can’t confidently say what is happening in a single picture. You can make guesses with varying levels of confidence. That’s just logic? So really, the test seems to sort people based on whether they make poor inferences quickly? Sounds like it isn’t identifying autism, but people that are shitty at logic.
But perhaps the intent of the test isn’t actually to accurately describe what is happening in the picture, but instead to give “vibes.” The people at the beach picture gives the “vibes” of vacation because the likelihood of the viewer of the picture to live near is a beach is actually pretty low. Same thing with Stonehenge. Essentially, the (biased) collective unconscious association of Stonehenge with celestial events.
In other words, due to the ambiguity in the test between vibes check vs. a literal, accurate description of the events transpiring in the picture, the people unable see the trees in a forest default to vibes and expect everyone else is like them. It is very “othering” by assuming the vibes check is the default position because a complete lack of thinking rigor being applied.
Anyhow, corporate trainings are a shitty scam given by very unqualified people in a lot of cases.
I dont think thats what the test is sorting on. I think its sorting on how people initially understand the question. I’m not autistic and I would have assumed that they were asking about vibes, at least for the beach photo (fuck that corporate training stuff). It would have taken additional clarification from the tester for me to assume they were asking about the literal people in the specific picture. I understood the question as “what idea do you assume I’m trying to convey with this photo” and not “what in literal reality is happening in this photo”.
The assumption that they wanted to know about the specific people pictured would not have immediately occurred to me but seems to be the first assumption of people who are autistic. So there may be a different way of thinking between allistic and autistic happening which I assume is what the test is measuring.
That said I don’t think either way of looking at the picture is wrong. I do think though that if you’re going to take an autism test you shouldn’t be upset if the test tells you that your answers indicate that you are autistic or that you are allistic. Youre literally asking for that feedback when engaging with the test…
they were talking about the difference between big picture thinking and evidence based thinking
This annoyed me so much that I had to stop reading for a few moments.
I’ve been in similar situations. One recent example was in music therapy. We listened to a song and were asked our impressions. My brain was breaking down instrumentation and phrasing, appreciating the lack of autotune, etc. But what they were shooting for with the question, and what probably about half the participants responded, was “that was pretty relaxing.” While true (if subjective), it’s the details that jumped out at me.
For what it’s worth I think your comment about the “grass having been cut” was very interesting and insightful. I’m not sure what the purpose of the training was but I’ll take a misinformed guess that they were trying to train people to all see and respond in the same way. And if so that’s bullshit. To truly grow, learn and work together it takes all kinds of perspective. The most interesting room is one full of people with different perspectives.
Hey man,
We’re in the business of selling hammers. So if all the problems look like a nail that’s great for our company! /S
I wholeheartedly agree with you!
If there were people in the photo conducting a celebration, that would let you know that it was the solstice, because people aren’t allowed near the stones at other times.
I doubt, though, that that is common knowledge to anyone from outside of the UK, so whoever designed that test has an unconscious bias.
I would have no idea being from the US. I’d like to think that any test given to me wouldn’t be about a culture I’m not familiar with in a country I don’t live, but I’ve been fooled before.
Exactly, and this is assuming that that detail was even in the photograph; I am only guessing - OP didn’t say so.
I don’t even know how widely it would be known to Brits, although Stonehenge has been in the news recently, on account of people throwing paint on it and bothering the lichen, so it might have been mentioned in those news reports.
I wrongly said that the Stonehenge photo was a test - OP said it was a training course.
Yeah, nah. This autistic labeling seems to be going overboard.
Different people see different things. And to use more visible examples, if you show a soldier and a random person a picture of a field and ask them what they see, you’re going to get different results. It’s called having a perspective, which is formed by individual experience. Different doesn’t automatically mean divergent, it means having lived a life.
And if I’m being superficial about it, people expecting mental unity are quite frankly insane.
What exactly is irking you? It seems the test worked really well.
Haha, you might be right. But the ‘correct’ nt answer is vacation, but there was no proof the people were there on holiday
The question wasn’t trying to assess your ability to analyse the picture accurately. It was testing your ability to determine the socially appropriate response. The ‘correct’ answer wasn’t relevant.
You were unable to identify that the questioner only wanted and only required a short simple response. One that only indicated the key concept the image related to. Further more you got fustrated with the question not having the ‘correct’ answer and got obsessed with it.
This type of question isn’t enough to diagnose someone, but it can be one of many indicators that may form a diagnosis.
Yeah, its not enough on its own. My assessment was a lot longer than just this one activity. I gave her a short answer which was people at a beach, as others have commented I think they look for an application of narrative, or absence of, in this particular test
From a lot of what I’ve seen, strong literalism and very little intuition is a pretty common trait with autism. You have a picture with a bunch of people at the beach, we’ll, you have a bunch of people at the beach. The lifeguard isn’t on vacation, some people could be there on a day trip, so why would you say vacation. Take the same picture, add a sign that says “Beachside Resort” and you might be more likely to say vacation.
I think this ties into how people with autism respond to open-ended and closed questions. What’s 2+2? Well, 4, obviously. What’s your favorite color? Shouldn’t be too hard. What’s the best color? Now it gets confusing. If I’m hunting, neon orange is great. If I’m painting the outside of my house, probably not neon orange. I probably want a different color than either of those for my bedroom, my clothes, my car. And now you’ve been staring at the evaluator for 30 seconds like they just asked you the meaning of life and how that is going to direct your goals for the next 20 years, when what a more neurotypical person would say is, “Blue, because it brings out my eyes.”
So if you look at those questions in that context, they may be very helpful for the evaluator to make a diagnosis, simply because there is no obvious answer.
Psychology is doing their best, it’s just that their best isn’t great compared to most other modern medicine. At this point, autism is still held by many in the same way it was in the 90s, only the negative traits, as some developmental disorder, etc. Some of the best tests compare the average answers to questions like that from previously diagnosed autistic people and non-autistic people. The way we think is so different, I’d wager studies would find this sort of difference with anything they asked, assuming they asked the question in a certain way and the autistic person gave the first answer that came to mind instead of the answer they’d give when masking. That doesn’t make the test invalid, it just proves how profoundly different the neurotypes are.
Autism wouldn’t be a disorder if everyone had the neurotype. The label is still strongly attached to the diagnosis given to people with this neurotype who also have severe mental disabilities. People still resist giving the diagnosis to high functioning adults, which muddies the field’s ability to study the neurotype and throws off all the statistics.
If someone showed me pictures of a tropical beach and said “what picture of?” I would say “vacation”. No question. I don’t care what’s happening in the picture, or how he formulated the question.
I think the difference isn’t big picture thinking or whatever the presenter was saying, it’s whether you rely on internal context when socializing or external. Most people rely on a large amount of shared internal context. A tropical vacation is a prototypical vacation and a picture of a tropical beach is a prototypical signifier of a tropical vacation. That’s all internal context because it’s in my brain not in the picture. If someone is showing me this picture, it’s more like we’re exchanging memes that we both know so we can vibe. He’s not asking me a genuine question or expecting real thought.
Prioritizing external context is a big part of the autistic spectrum. In a technical context, it’s important to prioritize external context so that you’re not blinded by your assumptions. In a social scenario, the focus on shared internal context smoothes over missteps and misunderstandings because no one is analysing what is said, they’re just responding to shared queues and vibing.
Also a work lesson on thinking styles is a primarily social setting. Maybe you were actually trying to learn, but the main purpose is to relax and socialize with your peers. The presentation is just there almost as an ice breaker introducing (hopefully fun) ideas to talk about after, serving as a basis for “memes”. For example, later if someone does something silly because he missed something obvious you could joke about missing the “big picture” to ease the tension and have a laugh about the situation with a reference to the presentation. So again no one is expecting anyone to actually analyse something or find solutions. They’re just vibing and sharing “memes”.
It feels like you were treating this like a technical meeting where you’re invited for your knowledge and skill. The questions asked were something that your considered seriously and tried to give an accurate answer to. You were taken aback because no one else was taking things seriously and they seemed to be somehow “correct”. They were correct, it was a social situation and they were vibing, that’s the average neurotypical behaviour in this situation. Analysing isn’t the average nt behaviour in this situation.
I don’t know if I’ve been helpful. I hope I have. My partner is autistic so I try to find helpful ways to explain how the nts are behaving and why. Sorry if it’s not useful or if I inadvertently said something hurtful.
No, not hurtful. Youre pretty much on the mark. You wrote that like it was in one of my books, very well explained. Im irked that linguistically, I gave the correct answers, as in I wasnt asked what vibe I get from the pictures. And yeah, the non-autistic thing would be to apply the context to fill in the gap.
I stumbled across this link on .world one time, and your comment made me think of it. Hopefully it’s entertaining if nothing else.
This reminds me of High School Art class. We were tasked with using water colour paints to colour a (photocopied) scene of a farm house with a long fence following a path, a few tufts of grass here and there.
Vague, just like I described. Everyone else painted lush rolling green fields with a red farm house.
I painted a beautiful winter scene, using the tufts of grass as a sprinkling of colour along the scene.
I loved the painting. I didn’t cheap out, but thought the scene was winter due to the lack of other defining characteristics to imply no snow. I sure felt stupid when I realized I was the only one who thought that. :(
These kinds of activities are meant to encourage creativity, but when that creativity shows how NON conforming your thoughts are compared to others, you can’t help but feel dumb, especially when others observe your thoughts.
Man, you’re so right about that. I had a similar experience.
I had an art class in middle school and was enjoying the hands on craft part of it, and getting to see the final output of the unique things everyone created. For one assignment, we had potted plants on our shared tables and were given paints and canvas and told to paint what we saw. I painted the plant like I saw it, trying to get all the leaves looking like the one leaf I saw that didn’t have any blemishes on it, and I got an F. I only understood after getting the F, what the instructor wanted was us to paint the exact colors and lines and light our eyes saw, unprocessed, not whatever processing and perspective our minds gave it. I got a D in the class, the first time I didn’t get an A for any class on a report card. Before that, I loved doing all kinds of art just for the sake of creating, without thinking about how other people would perceive it, and after that, I have never enjoyed making any art except music.
It was a pivotal moment besides that, because getting the D after trying my hardest and enjoying the process ultimately shifted my locus of control from mostly internal to almost completely external, and I no longer cared about doing well in school.
It’s like an inverse IQ test
Neurotypycal = implicit hubris? Maybe.
Mine is generally explicit.
The 10 Second Autism Assessment
Psych: Hi! Nice to meet you.
Autism: Looks at their face to assess emotional disposition Hi! Nice to meet you too (or “likewise”). Looks at them for greeting gestures (wave, handshake, hug, etc.) and reciprocates.
Psych: How are you?
Autism: Pause. Looks away. Good. nods head. How are you? engage welcoming smile protocol and stare through them
Psych: Confirmed.
Save yourself thousands of dollars and 3-4 hours.
Welcoming smile protocol: stretches lips to an approximation of what a smile should be, rest of face still looks confused and/or deep in thought
The Autism™
Yep, that’s one bunch of psychologists that should not stay in that job
I think lots of these years are more than a little dubious and people think differently without there being autism involved. I’d hope that these results are only considered in conjunction with other tests that confirm or refute the potential conclusions in order to find consistent patterns before any consideration of autism is entertained. But I don’t really know. There’s a lot of bias nowadays in science, unfortunately.
