Also needs to account for any manifestation of the “double empathy problem”—if us autistic folk have some degree of ‘social intelligence’ that works perfectly well with autistic folk but falters with allistic folk, and vice versa, then what are we measuring?
An example might be, one allistic social intelligence test is to determine emotional state from the expression of the eyes, and … … here I realize that there’s not exactly a standardized way to correctly determine recognition of states like inanimate object feelings, and not everyone is lexythmic enough to score perception of their emotional state overall …
… well, it needs some workshopping. But given the potential extent it’s just tricky for minds that don’t think alike to connect socially, we want to be explicit about what we’re measuring; if that’s social relationship performance independent of allistic/autistic state, specifically our ability to perform social relationships with allistic folk, the difference, or what.
I think there’s two ways this would show up in the research process.
First, autistic people’s social outcomes would have the potential to become better than what one would naively expect, as their relationships with other autists would drag up their social outcomes scores. This would lead to such factors being weighted less when one studies factors which influence social outcomes.
Secondly, once some concrete social abilities are discovered, one can directly investigate whether they exhibit double empathy dynamics.
Also needs to account for any manifestation of the “double empathy problem”—if us autistic folk have some degree of ‘social intelligence’ that works perfectly well with autistic folk but falters with allistic folk, and vice versa, then what are we measuring?
An example might be, one allistic social intelligence test is to determine emotional state from the expression of the eyes, and …
… here I realize that there’s not exactly a standardized way to correctly determine recognition of states like inanimate object feelings, and not everyone is lexythmic enough to score perception of their emotional state overall …
… well, it needs some workshopping. But given the potential extent it’s just tricky for minds that don’t think alike to connect socially, we want to be explicit about what we’re measuring; if that’s social relationship performance independent of allistic/autistic state, specifically our ability to perform social relationships with allistic folk, the difference, or what.
I think there’s two ways this would show up in the research process.
First, autistic people’s social outcomes would have the potential to become better than what one would naively expect, as their relationships with other autists would drag up their social outcomes scores. This would lead to such factors being weighted less when one studies factors which influence social outcomes.
Secondly, once some concrete social abilities are discovered, one can directly investigate whether they exhibit double empathy dynamics.