Autism
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Autism is a developmental condition which has two main criteria for diagnosis:
- the first is that the individual has difficulties with social interaction and communication;
- the second is that they have a restricted and repetitive range of interests and behaviour.
Traditionally, individuals with autism were thought to lack empathy (a claim which has been discredited) but they have also been thought to be unable to work out what other people are thinking.
As part of our work on this project we have argued that this is not true, rather than autistic individuals having a ‘broken’ ability to work out what others are thinking, we suggest that everyone is worse at working out what others are thinking when they are different from oneself. As a result, one might expect autistic individuals to be better at working out what other autistic people are thinking than non-autistic individuals.
WHAT WE FOUND
Previously, researchers thought that individuals with autism were not able to work out what other people are thinking, and that this explained why they might find social interaction difficult.
We showed that there are problems with this idea. For a start, it isn't actually the case that people with autism are unable to work out what other people are thinking. But could it perhaps be the case that individuals with autism are more likely to make mistakes when trying to work this out?
We then showed that the tests that are used to measure how good people are at understanding others' minds, are biased towards 'neurotypical' people - i.e. those without autism.
This is a problem because we have shown that people are better at working out what others are thinking when they are similar to themselves. So it's not surprising that people with autism make more mistakes when working out what non-autistic individuals are thinking.
What does this mean? We need new tests that measure how good people are at understanding other people's minds, and these tests should be developed together with people with autism.