That’s not exclusive to autism. It’s common in all people
That’s like saying “study shows autistic people need to drink water to survive”. But all people need to drink water to survive, so it’s a meaningless statement to limit it to autistic people. It has no informative point.
This is a very poor take, and it is clear you didn’t even read the abstract before deciding the study is pointless. There is an obvious value in determing not just what traits are shared between autistic individuals and neurotypical individuals, but also determining the degree and intensity.
To use your example, what if the study on drinking water showed they needed less water than an average person? Could that not be valuable, and lead to further research?
This study identified an anomaly. Autistic people have trouble identifying with emotions in other people, but for some reason seem to have no problems doing so for objects. Isn’t that strange? Doesn’t that beg the further question of why? Great revelations in research are built on tiny stones like this.
But this is why we study things?
Here, read for yourself (PDF link)
Glancing at their results there is appears to be a trend and that’s fine.
To conclude, we have provided the first slice of empirical evidence to suggest that autistic individuals may demonstrate a propensity toward object personification and anthropomorphism. It must be noted that our clinical sample was based on self-report (rather than objectively verified diagnoses) and respondents were recruited via convenience sampling – both of which may reduce the generalisability of the findings. However the results appear to echo the anecdotal comments made by autistic individuals. Furthermore, in our review of online forums, we were struck by the distressing tone of many posts (WrongPlanet.net, 2017). Autistic individuals reported sadness and despair when faced with an object that might be hurt or lonely, and several asked whether they might receive “help for their problem”. It will be important for future work to establish the frequency with which object personification causes distress, and if necessary, to identify possible structures for providing support.
Iirc, the point of the paper was that autistic people tend to do it more than non-autistic people, and on a broader scale.
Interestingly, one thing it pointed out was that people with autism tend to focus on the “non-human in online roleplaying and games” which is something I’ve (unsurprisingly) seen a lot.
That’s basically furries. Furries tend to be more likely to be autistic compared to the general population. I think non-autistic people tend to find furry stuff a bit uncanny at times, while autistic people can read them easily.
egg-fkin-zactly! You know how many people I have seen personify things they like? But…I don’t want the paper to be sad, so I guess I will read it =/!
This is going to sound horrible but 10/10 I am not reading this bullshit.
You don’t have to read but just because something is present in varying degrees in the population as a whole doesn’t mean specific subset can’t generally experience it to a higher degree.
Everyone sometimes feels anxious or like they can’t focus, but that doesn’t mean Anxiety Disorders or ADHD isn’t a thing.
Yes, it feels like psuedo-science and I am open to reading a lot but going two seconds into this I wanted to monkey scream in the individual Rebekah, etc. all’s face for being such dips.
I wish I could produce bullshit for a living and get paid for it too.
So it doesn’t feel sad; https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/autism/2018-white-2.pdf
I dont even personify people. Headline made me laugh though
it seems like every other week i discover that a trait i have is actually an autistic trait. my mind was blown when i first found out that kids tip-toeing can be a sign of them being on the autism spectrum (i’m diagnosed with Asperger’s and i was a tip-toeing kid)!
thankfully, i’m way too tired to read a potentially long paper. sorry, you would’ve been better without that manipulative title :(
The study is four pages long and is basically a survey with a couple different percentages of answers (autistic vs allistic) shown for the questions.
The neat part I noticed was the difference between men and women was a way bigger effect on the question “do you ever view objects as having gender” than the 'tism did.
I mean, apart from it being based on a subjective questionnaire - I see that they used t test and chi square and some of the results were significant, but when you look at the table, very often the percentages don’t vary or vary very little. Ok, a group had 14% vs 15% of a trait and the difference is significant, but when you take a step back you got to be careful with overinterpretation. To me, the table was all over the place. And to be fair, 80 ND and 250 NT aren’t exactly a huge sample size either. All in all, while an interesting paper, I think there are severe limitations to its significance and definitely needs further (and more profound) analysis.
But my being said, I am not from psychology studies, so maybe such approaches and numbers are more common? I’m from biomedical sciences and thus this reads more like a bachelor’s thesis.
Or
Hatred of manipulation in autism: How to ensure autists will flat out refuse to interact with you or your content
¯\(ツ)/¯
