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People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

sciencedaily.com

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Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don’t steal things from other peoples houses. That is how the country is run. You can, if you so wish, steal from peoples houses with impunity. The crime will very rarely be investigated, you're unlikely to be caught, etc. This system of black/white rules that you perceive exists, does not. This misperception lies at the origin of what's trigged your impulse to imagine some threat (which then triggers compas…

So now you wouldn’t call the place if you saw someone breaking into someone else’s house? Would you even call your neighbor? Would you do anything yourself? Gather gang of people together and go over there? But then you would be the police wouldn’t you?

As ever, it would be a case-by-case basis. I do not reason from the abstract to the particular, which i find generally immoral. Rather I consider the particular in all its details.

In general, someone breaking into a house is a present dangerous and serious threat. On that basis I would call the police, etc.

If someone opened the door, saw a mobile, grabbed it and ran off -- then i'd maybe leave a note with the neighbor

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I posted this study because I have Asperger’s and this is what was always said about my behavior. Yesterday I literally had to stop myself from sending photographs to the police of a guy walking his dog off leash in a park that has signs forbidding it. And my reason for wanting to call the police is because of my compassion for the dog or for anyone the dog to hurt. Not so much that it was only that the man was d…

This rhymes with my prejudice(?) that people on the autistic spectrum has a lower tolerance for cognitive dissonance. Like it's harder to ignore two truths that are incompatible. If it's true it kind of says more about non-autistic people than autistic people.

That seems plausible. Cognitive dissonance seems to play a significant role as a social lubricant. Even if there is no direct relationship with autism, the reduced social capacity could mean that they simply do not have the opportunity to develop as advanced a capacity for cognitive dissonance.

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compassion is more dangerous than sociopathy. Sociopaths are transactional, and often follow the rules on a transactional basis. To conduct a genocide, one needs compassion. In the way people are here having fantasies of dangerous dogs biting children, likewise similar fantasies of danger abound -- compassion for imagined victims driving overwhelming oppression. I dont consider this morality, quite the opposite. Mora…

I would love to know how compassion was used to cause the holocaust. But I think I see. I think I see your mistaking compassion for the self as compassion for the other. It’s easy to cause a holocaust if you cause people to only have compassion for themselves or their own kind. It’s very hard to create a holocaust if you have a universal compassion for all humans. So your answer is “well let’s get rid of all compassi…

No no, compassion for the other.

You see the germans imagined the jews a threat (and of course some were, as some of all people are -- just as some dogs are dangerous). Now all you need to do is make headlines of all the times a jewish person murdered someone and the like. Indeed, imagine it on youtube: all these videos of jewish criminals. Now you have waves of compassion for the victims of these criminals. It's trivial.

I take it in this case people here are making an identical argument that were made by those racists who imagined so much danger.

Of course when looking at the actual stats the german jews were no less or more violent than anyone, indeed, often a little less -- and often a little more patroitic in fact.

How here do we imagine dogs? Well 56 deaths from dog attacks in a decade -- far less than from people in that same time, of course.

Dogs, it seems, are incredibly well-behaved compared to people. Perhaps we should leash young men, or ban them from parks. That would have a much more dramatic impact

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#94
post #23

There was a similar article postulating that dissidents (for example from Eastern Europe) are often on the spectrum, for that very reason, if they see injustice, they are vocal about it.

Sounds like orientalism to me to be honest, and I would be vary of pathologising someone who takes part in a political struggle even if you don't mean bad. Not Eastern European, but were MLK or Nelson Mandela autistic? To me they seem quite well-adjusted and "normal personalities", except for being against the injustices around them.

No, they were not pathologising it, just explaining (or wondering about) the motivations of some (not all) of them, the fact they were willing to suffer for truth, with no apparent personal gain. And I don't have a link.

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#95
post #26

“With autism” A large portion of the autistic community is very against this phrasing. Autism is not a disease you carry, or something you “have”. It should be used as an adjective to describe a person: “Autistic people less likely to succumb to bystander effect” Edit: If you follow through to the actual paper referenced you can see they use the correct phrasing.

I'm a brown haired person. I'm also a person with brown hair. Neither phrasing makes my brown hair a disease I carry.

This is my take too. Ultimately the precise language used is immaterial. It is the intent behind it that matters. The precise language used may be indicative of intent, but that should be judged on a case-by-case basis rather than assuming "phrasing X good, phrasing Y bad", which will lead to both false positives and false negatives.

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#96
post #53
post #7

Anecdotal evidence: around me, several kids are on the autistic spectrum. It's hard to prevent them from intervening when they notice what they feel is an injustice, towards them or others. At some point, this included one of them regularly attempting to rescue babies from baby trolleys, which they considered a prison. Fortunately, the would-be rescuer was only aged 3 at the time.

From the outside, it's very very difficult to tell what the actual motivation is. As a kid on the spectrum, I learned very early to shut up about everything genuine in myself, because peoples' social reactions were so painful. I still have to unlearn that decades later. I did things similar to what the kids you mention do, and I think it was out of a very strong desire to "make incorrect things correct" rather than "…

Ha, I kept wondering whether I feel such a strong need to "make unjust things just", but "make incorrect things correct" rings much closer to home. I guess the former gets crippled hard by social anxiety, while the latter can drive a lot of behaviors where social contact isn't in the foreground.

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#97
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same mechanism, Autistic people may be less likely to agree with the social group's view of an example of injustice. Especially if the wider agreement has a contagious element that oversees its facts. Instead, ASD people may be more prone to attending to injustices that they can individually percieve.

It wasn't about "autism", but there was a study done a while ago, where it was the "cranky independent" people who intervened most. They might have been left-styled or right-styled; what they had in common was that they didn't go along with the crowd.

That doesn't feel contradictory. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a large intersection between autism and "cranky independence".

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, well said. Is it awareness and an application of injustice, or awareness of certain rules that are being applied only partially - the rules could go further. Because justice and riles are assuredly not the same thing. Who knows the truth to determine what is just for others? Ultimately, justice is best expressed by the golden rule: Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated. Dogs are at a…

no, the nuance is not about rules, the nuance is about right and wrong. It’s wrong for someone to walk around with an animal that could be dangerous or could harm other people or itself. In this case, the rules aligned with my moral understanding. Ashan sense of right and wrong is not based on outside rules, but it are internal perception. This is why many of us have anti-authoritarian tendencies. https://neuroclasti…

Great article, thanks for sharing and attempting to correct a misunderstanding. I'm going to submit it here actually - I liked it so much. (Except for the singular political snipe - '#AutisticWhileBlack'.)

> Autistic children in school are somewhat notorious for finding it hard to adapt to the authority of teachers– some teachers more than others. This is not because they’re evil little ragamuffins, as some teachers would have it, but because their natural state is to assume equanimity. Autistic students (and I speak from long experience) will not bow to authority for authority’s sake.

Great! The reverse speaks to the problem that I think is common place - people going along with behaviour that they know to be wrong/immoral. Eg coding software that will restrict and restrain others for money. The last few years gave so many examples too.

In all honesty, if this really is the common case, perhaps autistic people might be the best of us - there is no governance structure in their heads, just reasoning.

If that's it, I hope that some autistic folk also do not settle very easily, but continue to research the state of play, refuse to trust 'authority' or conventional knowledge, investigate what their philosophical outlook is, work out what they really know personally.

Re: People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds

#99
post #79

“With autism” A large portion of the autistic community is very against this phrasing. Autism is not a disease you carry, or something you “have”. It should be used as an adjective to describe a person: “Autistic people less likely to succumb to bystander effect” Edit: If you follow through to the actual paper referenced you can see they use the correct phrasing.

And yet, the clinical standard has been to use the "with" terminology for a long time now. For exactly the general reason that you present, just with your grammatical paradigm inverted. The fact is that anyone can copy and paste "offense" complaints and insert any grammar that they want into ad-lib spaces. What the ASD community could use less of is individuals utilizing it as their political arena.

> And yet, the clinical standard has been to use the "with" terminology for a long time now. For exactly the general reason that you present, just with your grammatical paradigm inverted.

If that's the clinical standard, why didn't the cited paper use it that way? From the research paper:

> autistic individuals

> autistic employees

> autistic participants

The peer reviewed research paper uses this standard. Only using "with" in reference to diagnoses.

It is "Science Daily", a news site, who skirts the standard by changing the paper's wording.

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