Jerk Tweets Sexist Remark, Prompts Me to Muse About the Meaning of "Freedom"

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people" - Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

It took a long time before this saying made any sense to me. Surely everyone knows that women are people, right? What else would they be? Space aliens? Robots? Very convincing holograms?

That was a joke --- I knew, even when I first heard the saying, that it was referring not to the tautology that female Homo sapiens are Homo sapiens, but to the philosophical concept of personhood. At the time, though, I couldn't imagine that anyone did not extend personhood fully to women, so the saying still struck me as bizarre.

Well, here is a wonderfully clear example of someone doing just that:

Tweet from Pax Dickinson saying "Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. How's that for an unpopular truth?" Image taken from the Public Shaming tumblr

This guy was, until recently, the Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, a popular news website with an emphasis on business and technology (particularly information technology) news.

But I don't care so much about who the speaker is so much as I do about what he is saying: Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. What? People are freer when fewer of them can vote? How does that make any sense?

I would submit that it only makes sense when you assume that the "individuals" he's talking about are men. Women's freedom is compatible with women's suffrage --- see recent elections in which women's votes made the difference between a Republican rape philosopher and a more liberal (if not always pro-choice) Democrat.

Women's votes made the difference in 2012 in the Indiana U.S. Senate race between Richard Mourdock (the "pregnancy from rape is God's will" guy) and Joe Donnelly*, in the Connecticut Senate race between Linda McMahon and Chris Murphy**, in the Massachusetts Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren***, in the Ohio Senate race between Josh Mandel and Sherrod Brown****, in the Pennsylvania Senate race between Tom Smith and Bob Casey*****, and in the Virginia Senate race between George Allen and Tim Kaine. 

Women's votes failed to make the difference in the Wisconsin Senate race between Tommy Thompson and Tammy Baldwin, and in the governor's races in Montana and Washington --- if only women had voted, the Democratic candidates would've won those races, but the Republicans' advantage among men was strong enough to carry them to victory anyway.

(It should be pointed out that, for the most part, abortion and other "women's issues" do not drive the gender gap in voting behavior --- there are much bigger differences between the sexes on whether to strengthen or cut back the welfare state and whether to pursue a hawkish or dovish foreign policy, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics. The hard-right candidates that women voters rejected in 2012 espoused both extreme anti-abortion, anti-contraception positions and a desire to greatly diminish the welfare state, so it's hard to tell whether their anti-choice zealotry was the deciding factor in alienating women voters. But the fact remains that, if only men had voted, a lot more of those anti-choice zealots would be sitting in Congress today.)


So, besides being more likely to vote against candidates looking to curtail their reproductive freedoms, women also vote for candidates they think will strengthen the social safety net. What does that have to do with personal freedom?

Well, I think having a robust social safety net is critical for maximizing individual freedom: there are a lot more choices available to you if you don't have to worry about losing your home and being unable to feed yourself and your family if you lose your job. You're more free to blow the whistle if you think your employer is doing something unethical, to fight against what you see as unfair or exploitative working conditions, and to engage in political activism or commentary outside of work without being afraid that these things will cost you your job. You are also more free to leave a job for whatever reason. There's a reason FDR named "freedom from want" as one of his Four Freedoms, and why he used that word --- freedom --- instead of, say, "rights" or "entitlements" or "needs."

There's also a subset of welfare-undermining measures that serve only to criminalize poverty, to subject people needing government assistance to intrusive, degrading treatment and erode their freedom. Things that fall into this category are mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, requiring welfare recipients to document that they spent a certain number of hours each week either working or engaging in approved job-seeking or job-preparatory activity, tying the amount of money a family receives to how well their children are doing in school, or requiring people applying for welfare to be fingerprinted.

People who favor such mean-spirited measures usually think there are legions of idlers living on welfare just because they don't want to work, and spending their benefits on luxury items. 

(They are mistaken --- almost every form of public assistance that exists in the US is time-limited or situation-specific, like unemployment insurance (which expires after a certain number of weeks that varies by state), the program people are usually thinking of when they say "welfare" (which is officially called TANF: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which has, among many other limitation, a five-year lifetime cap on benefits), or WIC (which you can only get if you are pregnant, nursing, or have children younger than five years old). The one program that doesn't come with a predetermined expiration date is food stamps, which you can only get if you make 130% of the federal poverty rate or less, and which you can only use to buy food).

But whether or not the idlers exist, it's important to focus on the fact that these people --- the people who favor draconian measures to curb welfare fraud --- are more concerned with ferreting them out than with getting aid to those who need it, and subjecting those people to minimal state intrusion and hassle. That does not sound like a person who is concerned with human freedom; to me, that sounds a lot more like a person who cares little for people and a whole lot for pinching pennies.

There are some personal-freedom issues on which women tend to favor more restrictive policies than men do: according to this poll, women are less likely than men to support legalizing marijuana, to give just one example. But the conclusion one draws from that, taking into account everything I've said above, isn't that men are pro-freedom and women are anti-freedom; it's that most people favor at least some restrictions on individual freedoms, and that there are some differences between the sexes in terms of what should be allowed and what should be forbidden. The only way you arrive at "Women's suffrage is incompatible with individual freedom" is by defining "individual freedom" so selectively as to leave out any personal-freedom issue on which women are more liberal than men.

*Donnelly is pro-life, but unlike Mourdock he would allow an exception to a general ban on abortion for victims of forcible rape. He also voted for the Affordable Care Act and for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

**McMahon supported the Blunt amendment, which would've allowed employers to opt out of providing insurance coverage for contraception. She also wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is slightly more popular among women than among men (i.e., for women it's almost a 50/50 split, while men are opposed by a slim majority). 

***The biggest issue at stake in this race was obviously regulation and reform of the financial sector, which is not a "women's issue" but is, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, a greater priority with women voters than with men, though this poll shows huge majorities of both sexes favoring reform.

****Mandel seems to have campaigned on his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and the fact that his opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, voted for it. Mandel also opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and including sexual orientation and gender identity in anti-discrimination laws. 

*****Casey is pro-life, but unlike Smith he would allow an exception to a general ban on abortion for victims of rape or incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger. He voted for the Blunt amendment, but has also voted to protect Planned Parenthood's federal funding under Title X, and to rescind the Mexico City Policy (aka the "global gag rule" forbidding aid organizations from even referring people for abortion services). He also supported the Paycheck Fairness Act and introduced a bill to require colleges to do more to prevent (and track, and prosecute) sexual assault and domestic violence. Smith, as I mentioned, favors a total ban on abortion with no exceptions, and is one of the lesser-known Republican rape philosophers.

So, Feministe has a pretty interesting post (responding to this article in the New York Times) about family dinner conversations, and how they shape a person's rhetorical style.


Here's how Jill describes her family's dinnertime ritual:

Even when I go home, still, a sit-down dinner and a long discussion is non-negotiable. The TV gets turned off. We don't answer the phone. There are no cell phones allowed at the table. There isn't a structured conversation --- we just talk. And since I come from a family of political junkies, the conversation inevitably turns to politics; since I also come from a family of people who like to push boundaries and challenge each other, the conversation inevitably turns into an argument. No one yells --- we aren't a yelling family --- but voices get raised and sarcasm gets thrown around and even though we're all lefty liberals we get deep into it.

And then we clean up and we watch some CNN and we all move on with our lives. It never occurred to me that dinner-time arguments over, say, farming subsidies or the proper legal treatment of child molesters could create lasting wounds or ongoing anger. Which is maybe why it's taken me years to figure out that, in the blogosphere, you can't come at someone hard in a comment section and expect that they understand you're challenging them because you respect them and find their views interesting, and that they will respond to your challenges and heated critiques with the same, and you'll both walk away still liking each other and not thinking about it much beyond, "Well that was an interesting discussion." Most people just think you're a flame-throwing asshole. I blame my parents.

One person, in comments, mentioned how they felt like the absence of any dinnertime conversation (or, really, any conversation at all beyond the most perfunctory) while they were growing up deprived them of the chance to develop any kind of rhetorical or conversational skills.


My own experiences are like Jill's in a lot of ways: my family, too, sits down for a home-cooked meal and unstructured conversation every night, and does not really consider any subject to be taboo. Certainly not politics, which is discussed frequently. But we don't argue like Jill's family does; we're more conflict-averse, we're not very emotionally expressive (indeed, we tend to be uncomfortable with strong emotions), and, for me at least, argument is not a style of discussion that I am very good at. My mind works slowly, taking time to unfold and absorb every aspect and ramification of whatever I have just been told (besides the fact that I don't think in words and need to "translate" something into the pictorial/abstract colors-and-shapes milieu of my thoughts, and auditory-processing issues mean it takes me longer to decode spoken language than written language, so in conversation I have a particularly long lag time between hearing and understanding), and any thoughts I might have in response to whatever I've just been told also take time to form themselves. I am thus in the position of not yet knowing what I think when it is time for me to speak. I may not even know what you've just said by the time you're done saying it and waiting for me to respond. 


To accommodate this, I tend to treat discussion less as a contest between ideas than as a process of discovering what each person's ideas are. 


Because I have often found that people's ideas are interconnected in unpredictable ways (including my own), just stating what one thinks about something isn't always enough. Sometimes if you say one thing, the person you're talking to proceeds as if you had said that thing, and a whole bunch of other things you haven't said and aren't sure you even understand. I have also made these assumptions about other people, thinking that I had found a word or phrase to express a bundle of concepts and then finding that, in the other person's lexicon, that word didn't come with all the connotations it carried in my head. So I try and identify the premises I am starting from, and the premises that I and my interlocutor hold in common. From there, I will try to explain how I get to whatever proposition we're debating from those premises, and will also listen to my friend (I can pretty much only do this with friends) draw me a similar map of his or her reasoning.


What Jill's post got me to realize is that this style of conversation, which it has taken me years to develop, might not solely be an accommodation of my cognitive and communicative quirks. It might also be something I have carried with me from childhood, modeled somewhat on the kind of dinnertime conversations my family has.


(Obviously, it couldn't be an exact copy of my family's conversational style, or I wouldn't have had to develop it, but I do feel that what I have jerry-rigged together for myself probably has roots in how my family communicates. It's an adapted version, but I am starting to see some shared features).


Anyway, if you were going to describe my family in terms of what kind of people they are (like Jill describes her family as political junkies), you'd probably call us science nerds. As much as we talk about politics, it's not the thing we talk about most. Most of our dinnertime conversation is of a technical nature, drawing on whatever field each of us is trained in (electromagnetics, chemistry, biology, medicine). Because we are not all trained in the same things, we often have to include a lot of background information leading up to whatever it is we want to discuss. (When my siblings and I were children, this was almost always our dad explaining something about electromagnetics, but now that I have my own body of knowledge and experience, I will sometimes find myself holding forth about chemistry or biochemistry). So my family tends to explain rather than argue, because many of the things we talk about require explanation before they can be discussed in any depth. 


I think now that habit, as much as my needing to slow conversations down and check repeatedly to make sure everyone is on the same page, has predisposed me to prefer a collaborative, expository conversational style to an adversarial, argumentative one, and to feel myself disadvantaged when I do find myself in the middle of an actual debate.     

An Intriguing Idea from Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

In Chapter 19 (titled "Gender Detectives") of her book, Delusions of Gender (which I review here), Cordelia Fine describes how children learn to sort themselves into gender categories:

Anyone who spends time around children will know how rare it is come across a baby or child whose sex is not labeled by clothing, hairstyle, or accessories. Anyone with ears can hear how adults constantly label gender with words: he, she, man, woman, boy, girl, and so on. And we do this even when we don't have to. Mothers reading picture books, for instance, choose to refer to storybook characters by gender labels (like woman) twice as often as they chose nongendered alternatives (like teacher or person). [Gelman, Taylor & Naguyen, 2004] Just as if adults were always referring to people as left-handers or right-handers (or Anglos and Latinos, or Jews and Catholics), this also helps to draw attention to gender as an important way of dividing the social world into categories.

This tagging of gender --- especially different conventions for male and female dress, hairstyle, and accessories, and use of makeup --- may well help children learn how to divvy up the people around them by sex. We've seen that babies as young as three to four months old can discriminate between males and females. At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male or female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. [Levy & Haaf, 1994] This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already learning to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. [Serbin, Poulin-Dubois, & Eichstedt, 2002 (PDF); Poulin-Dubois et al., 2002] And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong. [Zosuls et al., 2009]

It's at this critical point in their toddler years that children lose their status as objective observers. It is hard to merely dispassionately note what is for boys and what is for girls once you realize that you are a boy (or a girl) yourself. Once children have personally relevant boxes in which to file what they learn (labeled "Me" versus "Not Me"), this adds an extra oomph to the drive to solve the mysteries of gender. [Martin, Ruble & Szkrybalo, 2002 (PDF); Martin & Halverson, 1981] Developmental psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble suggest that children become "gender detectives," in search of clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe. [Martin & Ruble, 2004 (PDF)] Nor do they wait for formal instruction. The academic literature is scattered with anecdotal reports of preschoolers' amusingly flawed scientific accounts of gender difference:

[O]ne child believed that men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee. Another child, dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced "only boys like cold water, right Dad?" Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and "chewing" on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment. [Ruble, Lurye, & Zosuls, 2008]

In a later chapter, she hypothesizes that this drive to delineate gender categories, and to sort oneself into one of them, might stem from a broader human desire to belong to a group:

As we've seen, children are born into a world in which gender is continually emphasized through conventions of dress, appearance, language, color, segregation, and symbols. Everything around the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance. Meanwhile, at about two years of age, children discover on which side of the divide they are located. It remains to be seen, in my view, whether subtle gender differences in babies' toy preferences before they know their own sex can be explained by socialization by parents, unwitting or otherwise. But once children know their own sex, in theory they can start to take socialization into their own hands.

And it's plausible to think that they will. Gaining membership to a group, any group, normally brings a money-back guarantee of favoritism. In the infamous minimal group studies conducted by Henri Tajfel and colleagues, adults are randomly assigned to trivial groups. For example, they are asked to estimate the number of dots on an array, and then categorized as either a dot overestimator or a dot underestimator. It's hard to imagine a categorization of less psychological significance. And yet membership of even such arbitrarily assigned and short-lived social categories can engender a warm glow toward fellow dot overestimators (or underestimators) that does not extend so far as those who take a different approach to dot guesstimating.

Children, it turns out, are also susceptible to an in-group bias to prefer what belongs to their group. Recent work by Rebecca Bigler and colleagues has shown that this is especially the case when groups are made visually distinct, and authority figures use and label the groups. In one study, three- to five-year-old preschoolers in two child-care classrooms were randomly assigned to the Blue group or the Red group. Over a three-week period all the children wore a red or blue T-shirt every day (according to the group to which they'd been assigned). In one classroom, the teachers left it at that. The color groups were not mentioned again. But in the other classroom, the teachers made constant use of the two categories. Children's cubbies were decorated with blue and red labels, at the door they were told to line up with Blues on this side and Reds on that side, and they were regularly referred to by group label ("Good morning, Blues and Reds"). At the end of the three weeks, the experimenters canvassed each child's opinion on a number of matters. They found that being categorized as a Red or a Blue for just three weeks was enough to bias children's views. The children, for example, preferred toys they were told were liked by their own group and expressed a greater desire to play with other Red (or Blue) children. While some forms of favoritism were common to all the children, more was seen in kids from the classroom in which teachers had made a bigger deal out of the Red versus Blue dichotomy.

Just imagine how powerfully exactly the same psychological mechanisms can drive in-group pride and out-group prejudice when it comes to gender. In the young child's world, gender is the social category that stands out above all others, right from the start. Conventions of clothing and accessories mean that gender is extremely obvious visually, and boys and girls may be regularly labeled and organized ("Now it's the boys' turn to wash their hands") by gender, especially in early education settings. And, unlike adults and older children, younger children don't tend to have other social categories like jock, doctor, Christian or artist with which to identify. The drive for group belonging may explain why young children insist on girlish or boyish behavior or dress even in the face of parental displeasure, suggest Diane Ruble and colleagues.

This theory is really interesting to me, and I particularly like the idea that it's not a particular set of gender-related traits that are innate, but rather 1) the capacity to distinguish the sexes, and to know one's own sex, and 2) the drive to find one's place in the social group in which one lives. In our large, mobile, relatively fluid but still highly gendered society, gender roles are probably going to be the first social identities that suggest themselves to a child.

I like this theory, because it explains a lot of the same things that "hard-wiring" theories of gender explain, but it's much more flexible. Which is good, considering that gender norms have changed, a lot, throughout history and today's conceptions of the Eternal Feminine or the Eternal Masculine sometimes conflict with these past notions of masculine and feminine.

(One trivial example: pink and blue. Pink used to be for boys, because it was like a softer version of red, while blue, the color of the Virgin's veil, used to be for girls. Now, of course, it's the other way round).

There is one thing that the book doesn't address, that I'd like what Fine (or any of those developmental psychologists she cites) thinks about it: given that the usual course is for children to discover what sex they are, and then become interested in learning, and correctly performing, the gender role corresponding to that sex, why do some children choose a different sex to emulate?

I can remember that, while I did not always think of myself as having gender (or even as being human) throughout my entire childhood, when I did think in those terms I always knew two things: 1) I was a girl, and 2) I was, and wanted to be, like a boy. And when I grew up, I would be a woman who was like a man. Furthermore, this wasn't just who I was in the absence of any gender self-socialization; I self-socialized in very much the way Fine describes. I just chose to learn, and conform to, the masculine role.

That sort of thing --- why you would choose to imitate people of the other sex, rather than your own --- isn't answered. And neither is the related matter of how transgenderedsexual* people form their gender identities --- they often have strong senses of themselves as sexed, gendered beings, but the sex and gender categories they feel they belong to are not the ones assigned to them at birth.

*Edited 1/23/11 to reflect Juliet's preference, stated in comments, for "transsexual" over "transgendered."

Does Teaching Emotional Literacy Foster Compassion?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Time magazine ran an article this week describing a radical new anti-bullying program that tries to teach young children empathy by having them observe a mother and baby, and try to figure out what the baby is feeling. This is supposed to help them imagine themselves in another's place, and also to help them learn to put their own feelings into words. Evaluations of the program show that it does decrease "aggressive behavior" and increase "pro-social behavior," but I have doubts that it's really all that effective against the kind of cruel harrassment and intimidation campaigns so many of us remember from middle and high school. It doesn't seem to me like that's anger boiling over so much as a decision coolly reached that some people just aren't worth treating like people. And I'm not sure empathy training can address that.

An antibullying initiative sure to give Counselor Troi the warm fuzzies

I read this article in this week's Time magazine with great interest --- it describes an educational program called Roots of Empathy that aims to make children kinder, more peaceful and more considerate of others by teaching them to pay attention to how other people are feeling, and to the ways one's own behavior can affect other people's feelings.

Here's a description of how it works from Roots of Empathy's own "About" page:

At the heart of the program are a neighbourhood infant and parent who visit the classroom every three weeks over the school year. A trained ROE Instructor [link] coaches students to observe the baby's development and to label the baby's feelings. In this experiential learning, the baby is the "Teacher" and a lever, which the instructor uses to help children identify and reflect on their own feelings and the feelings of others. This "emotional literacy" taught in the program lays the foundation for more safe and caring classrooms, where children are the "Changers". They are more competent in understanding their own feelings and the feelings of others (empathy) and are therefore less likely to physically, psychologically and emotionally hurt each other through bullying and other cruelties. In the ROE program children learn how to challenge cruelty and injustice. Messages of social inclusion and activities that are consensus building contribute to a culture of caring that changes the tone of the classroom. The ROE Instructor also visits before and after each family visit to prepare and reinforce teachings using a specialized lesson plan for each visit. Research results from national and international evaluations of ROE indicate significant reductions in aggression and increases in pro-social behaviour.

That's the theory; here's a bit from the Time article describing how it works in practice:

At a public school in Toronto, 25 third- and fourth-graders circle a green blanket and focus intently on a 10-month-old baby with serious brown eyes. Baby Stephana, as they call her, crawls back toward the center of the blanket, then turns to glance at her mother. "When she looks back to her mom, we know she's checking in to see if everything's cool," explains one boy, who is learning how to understand and respond to the emotions of the baby --- and to those of his classmates --- in a program called Roots of Empathy (ROE).

...

One of the most promising antibullying programs, ROE (along with its sister program, Seeds of Empathy) starts as early as preschool and brings a loving parent and a baby to classrooms to help children learn to understand the perspective of others. The nonprofit program is based in part on social neuroscience, a field that has exploded in the past 10 years, with hundreds of new findings on how our brains are built to care, compete and cooperate. Once a month, students watch the same mom and baby interact on the blanket. Special ROE instructors also hold related classes and discussions before and after these visits throughout the course of the school year.

"We love when we get a colicky baby," says founder Mary Gordon. Then the mother will usually tell the class how frustrating and annoying it is when she can't figure out what to do to get the baby to stop crying. That gives children insight into the parent's perspective --- and into how children's behavior can affect adults, often something they have never thought about.

When Baby Stephana cries, an ROE instructor helps students consider what might be bothering her. They are taught that a crying baby isn't a bad baby but a baby with a problem. By trying to figure out how to help, they learn to see the world through the infant's eyes and understand what it is like to have needs but no ability to express them clearly.

That last part, the part I highlighted in bold text? I think that's a crucial thing to understand, but I'm not sure children are the ones who most urgently need remedial lessons in it.

Failing to grasp that someone without language will still have needs, and will use whatever other means of communication they have to try to call other people's attention to their need, underlies a lot of the most abusive, callous treatment of developmentally disabled people by their caregivers.

Accordingly, I'd love to see a similar empathy-building program for would-be paraprofessionals, special-ed teachers, home health aides, etc. I think caregivers often fail to put themselves in their clients' shoes, and appreciate the anxiety/stress/pain/hunger/whatever that the client was feeling, and the added stress of not being able to tell the caregiver what they needed, and instead either blame the client for "acting out" or, worse, consider hir beneath blame, so broken and messed up by virtue of hir disability that nothing ze does could ever possibly be a response to anything, just a "behavior" that happens randomly, like error messages from a glitchy computer.

Anyway, back to Time, and back to (some more of) the theoretical underpinnings of Roots of Empathy:

[L]ike language acquisition, the inherent capacity to empathize can be profoundly affected by early experience. The first five years of life are now known to be a critical time for emotional as well as linguistic development. Although children can be astonishingly resilient, studies show that those who experience early abuse or neglect are at much greater risk of becoming aggressive or even psychopathic, bullying other children or being bullied themselves.

That helps explain why simply punishing bullies doesn't work. Most already know what it's like to be victimized. Instead of identifying with the victims, some kids learn to use violence to express anger or assert power. [Bolding and italics mine]

After a child has hurt someone, "we always think we should start with 'How do you think so-and-so felt?'" Gordon says. "But you will be more successful if you start with 'You must have felt very upset.'" The trick, she says, is to "help children describe how they felt, so that the next time this happens, they've got language. How they can say 'I'm feeling like I did when I bit Johnny.'"

When children are able to understand their own feelings, they are closer to being able to understand that Johnny was also hurt and upset by being bitten. Empathy is based on our ability to mirror others' emotions, and ROE helps children recognize and describe what they're seeing.

I really like this idea in general, and think it's based on some pretty sound principles --- especially the ones about giving people the verbal tools to help vent their frustrations, or ask for help dealing with them, and about understanding that much of what we experience as "problem behavior" from others comes when they are experiencing stresses that overwhelm their ability to cope.

I have no trouble at all believing that this type of training greatly helps kids learn to handle their own feelings in a safe, non-destructive way, and to be more considerate of their classmates' needs and feelings. (This is indeed what independent evaluations of ROE --- there have been nine so far --- have shown: lasting increases in prosocial behaviors like sharing, helping others, being fair and trying to include everyone; in social and emotional knowledge; in kids' sense of their classroom as a caring, safe place; and lasting decreases in aggressive behavior).

But I am not sure that bullying --- a sustained, calculated campaign of terror against targets chosen for their vulnerability --- is in the same category as the aggressive behaviors ROE nips in the bud. Bullying doesn't seem to me like a spontaneous outpouring of emotion too intense to be contained, from a person too inarticulate or emotionally illiterate to express it without violence. Most bullies know exactly what they're doing, and have enough self-control not to do it; I know this because they're able to keep the worst of their violence hidden from authority figures. Some bullies are also very articulate and emotionally intelligent, convincing their victims that they are "friends," and guilt-tripping victims for not doing everything they ask. (The comments section of this old post on Pandagon is full of useful insights about bullying, and similarities between bullying and spousal abuse).

I think bullying comes because the bullies have keen insight into social dynamics --- they see that some people are less powerful, less well-liked, less noticed, less valued than others. They see that, they realize they could do just about anything to one of those unfortunates, and they decide, coolly and rationally, that so-and-so isn't a person, or at least isn't anyone worth treating like a person.

In most cases, there might not be any deep emotional turmoil underlying their cruel treatment of so-and-so; they do it because they can, end of story. Empathy training might help somewhat by making potential bystanders more likely to intervene, and stick up for the person being bullied, and it might also make it harder for potential bullies to tune out their targets' feelings if they've been trained from preschool to notice people's feelings.

I also think one of the major factors emboldening bullies is the larger culture's tacit (and sometimes explicit) endorsement of the very ideas bullies are experimenting with: specifically, that there are people who matter and people who don't and that you treat people differently according to which group they're in. All the empathy training in the world won't wipe out bullying if that doesn't change.

Small Victories

I saw something in this past Sunday's Kansas City Star that gave me a tiny bit of hope, both for our culture in general and the ongoing atrocity that is the Judge Rotenberg Center in particular: the Thayer Learning Center*, a boot-camp-style institution for "troubled teens," which has accumulated a fairly long list of complaints of abuse and neglect of its inmates since its opening in 2002, has closed, and been sold to a Cheyenne Indian educator named Lakota John, who plans to open a new, very different kind of school on the old Thayer grounds.

The new school will be geared toward Native American young people of all tribes, with emphases on sustainable agriculture (using traditional, Native American farming methods), outdoor skills, and Native American culture, art and spirituality.

While I'm sure the original proposals for the old Thayer Learning Center sounded equally high-minded, and while, at this early stage, all we really have are words, I still think that, based on what's been said about how the White Buffalo Academy will be run, there will be factors in place offering some protection against a Thayer-like pattern of systematic abuses taking root there once more.

First, and to my mind foremost, where Thayer kept its inmates isolated from their families and from the larger community of Kidder, Missouri, the White Buffalo Academy is meant to be extensively integrated with various communities: not just Kidder, but also with the various Native American tribes, international humanitarian organizations, and, eventually, other schools and youth organizations (like the Boy and Girl Scouts) across the region.

From the Chillicothe, Missouri Constitution-Tribune:

"If he does what he plans to do, I think it will be a huge asset to the community," says Kidder Mayor Melissa Gough of Lakota John. Her concerns about the future of the facility center on the controversies surrounding the former teen boot camp. ...
...
Mayor Gough has expressed her concerns about secrecy surrounding the former operation to Lakota John and he has assured her that students who may help with trash pickup and other community projects in Kidder will be allowed to talk to locals and give their names (Thayer cadets were not allowed to do so). In fact, he wants to be open and totally honest with the community and invites anyone who wishes to come and visit the facility and talk to him about his plans to open the academy in the next 30 days.

From the St. Joseph, Missouri News-Press & Gazette:

The school will become part of the Utah-based Sacred Path Recovery Program [link], with plans to open in all 50 states and Canada. The organization is composed of various tribes. An informational brochure said Sacred Path "is designed to help people identify, process, and release the issues that deny them the right to live happy, productive lives."

Traditional American Indian methods will be utilized.

"It's for all kids that want to achieve a higher level of learning," added Lakota, whose ancestors hailed from the North American plains.

The academy also will feature American Indian powwows, drumming, sculpting, equestrian arts, an amphitheater with surround sound for various performances, and other activities. Vietnam War veterans will be brought in as speakers.

Another emphasis will be placed on growing quality food, proper eating and overall wellness.

"We're going to start an agricultural program," he said. A slow-drying process for food will be created to benefit overseas humanitarian projects, and negotiations are under way with major companies for their assistance. Herbs will be grown on a farm and livestock will be raised. Outdoor skills will be taught.

"Our soils are going to be phenomenal," he said.

Plans also call for extending invitations to the region's scout programs and schools. The academy will serve perhaps 100 students.

"My thing is making sure we do things in moderation," Lakota said. "We want to build a community of solid individuals ... I want to do this very low-key. We want to do this with love."

The academy will offer preparatory education for students who wish to enroll at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and other institutions. A grand opening date for the White Buffalo Academy will be announced later.

Besides the emphases on transparency and community involvement, which at the very least would make abuses harder to keep hidden for very long, as the Thayer owner-operators did, I also think I see an important difference in the two enterprises' attitudes toward the young people in their care. Thayer Learning Center's guiding principle was literally to break the wills of its young inmates: the harsh treatment and withholding of basic necessities (like, say, water, food, rest, opportunity to bathe) until inmates "earned" them by obedience were meant to teach these willful children "the meaning of no." A philosophy like this is practically a recipe for abuse and neglect, because when you treat people who depend on you like enemies to be vanquished, you will react to everything they say or do as if it's a threat or a stratagem. You'll learn to ignore their signs of distress, and you'll let them die --- of something as treatable or preventable as a spider bite or overexertion or dehydration --- before you'll risk letting them put one over on you.

I don't see this kind of alienation in any of the online material I've seen about White Buffalo Academy or its parent organization, the Sacred Path Program. Rather than stamp out behaviors/attitudes they don't like, these organizations seem more interested in empowering their students, teaching them to be the best they can be and restoring their ancestral heritage and culture to them.

So, on to the million-dollar question: What factors forced Thayer Learning Center to close, and can similar factors be made to converge on the Judge Rotenberg Center? What makes these two abusive institutions different?

*Pedantic linguistic aside: I *HATE* the euphemistic use of "learning center" to describe what is essentially a prison. While the mental and behavioral adaptations people make to survive in a prison/institution environment --- keep your head down, don't cause trouble, don't draw attention to yourself, keep quiet, mind your own business and do as you're told --- might be called "learning," in the Skinnerian sense of that word, they also tend to sabotage a person's capacity for any other kind of learning. You get really good at surviving that hostile environment, but the price you pay is that you lose those parts of yourself that don't help you do that.

Laura Tisoncik describes this kind of psychic shriveling really well in this 2004 conversation with Amanda Baggs:

I spotted [characteristic psychiatric-institution-survivor behavior] in you right away. How do I describe it? You were an obvious case of it. You had a kind of submissiveness ... you were oftentimes looking for where the rules were so you could follow the rules. ... You were waiting or looking for the institution around you, as if, it's like, "Where is it, it's hiding here somewhere!" This is not necessarily a very constructive behavior out in the real world, because it is particularly passive in many ways, and because it is sort of like looking around for it. I really got a sense that you were looking around all the time for the rules. And terribly terrified that you were violating all the rules.

Why Autistic Pride?

Yesterday was Autistic Pride Day, and as I was pondering what, if anything, I would write about autistic pride, I came across these comments on Gonzo's Autistic Pride Day post:

Norah said...
... I never saw the point of an autistic pride day myself. It would be like having a 'long blond hair pride day' to me or something (although of course technically I'd fail that one since I dye my hair).

and

kathleen said...
I don't understand the idea of a pride day either...It could just be me...but I find it condescending...and yet another way of categorizing people...instead of just saying people. Don't know if that makes sense. I know I would be horrified if there were a "fat ass" pride day...I am more than my ass! :)

What these commenters are saying does make sense to me --- I feel this sort of neutrality toward --- and sense of being more than --- quite a few categories to which I belong.

My autism is not one of them, though. To me, my autism isn't just one more thing about me --- in one way or another, it touches everything about me.

That's not to say that the above-quoted commenters are any less autistic than I am, though! I think lots of factors go into determining which aspects of our (complex, multifaceted) identities we see as fundamental, and another, only semi-overlapping, set of factors influences which traits we decide to carry over into a sense of collective identity.

It's this idea of collective identity that I think determines whether a person regards a given trait as politically salient. If you are acutely conscious of your minority status --- that you differ in some nontrivial way from all, or most, of the people around you --- you might react with particular interest when you meet other people who share this difference. You might begin to think of yourself as a kind of dual citizen, belonging both to the community in which you actually live and to the smaller, more dispersed community of people sharing your particular minority status.

I think this partly explains why I do not see my atheism as being very important, while many other atheists consider it very important, and certainly politically salient. I grew up in a secular home, and in the small town where I spent much of my childhood, religion was a nonissue in our neighborhood and in the schools I went to. Thus, I never experienced being marginalized for my irreligion, as many young American atheists do, especially in the Midwest.

While my atheist example might give the impression that it's the traits we're harrassed, excluded or otherwise singled out by other people for that always end up being most important to us, I don't think that's quite true. I think the trait also has to relate somehow to one's deepest values, or to encapsulate a large part of one's sense of self*. To go back to autism, I don't remember having been targeted for any particular ill-treatment because I was autistic; I was always conscious of being different from others, but this difference was generally treated as a benign one.

It definitely went beyond consciousness of myself as different, though --- and even beyond knowing how I was different. I was going to special camps and activities for autistic children off and on throughout my childhood, and thus met quite a few other autistics, with whom I was always conscious of sharing something I didn't share with my regular classmates.

"Autistic" is probably the first thing I learned to identify myself with. This word, and the differences it implied, began to permeate my diffuse awareness long before I could even be said to have a self-concept.

For me, the statement "I like being autistic" is a close relative of the statement "I like myself."

*I think this, as well as personal experience and shared histories of oppression and exclusion from mainstream society, explains why race and class are still such important aspects of identity --- the people who share one's race or class are likely to be one's own family, and thus pressure to reject that race or class is often felt as pressure to turn one's back on one's family.

Autism, Epilepsy and Religious Experience

I had one other thought regarding Daniel Tammet's book Born on a Blue Day that I didn't bother working into my other post on that book because it didn't have anything to do with any of the other topics I raised there.

I knew before opening the book, somehow, that Tammet was a practicing Christian. What I hadn't known, and what triggered a cascade of associations and questions in my mind when I read it, was that he also had temporal-lobe epilepsy.

Seizures triggered in the temporal lobes, as this website spells out in exhaustive detail, are not the kind of seizures we typically imagine when we hear that word --- the kind where the person falls on the ground convulsing uncontrollably --- no, these seizures are often profound emotional experiences:

Within the temporal lobes of the brain is an evolutionarily ancient region called the limbic system. The main function of this system is to produce and control emotions. In particular, one important task which the limbic system performs is to "tag" sensory input with emotional significance, enabling us to determine the meaning that a person or object holds for us. When this function is disabled by brain damage, the result is Capgras' syndrome, described in Part 2 of this essay.

As with many brain structures, we know the function of the limbic system mostly by observing what happens to people in whom it is defective. Specifically, we have observed the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition characterized by erratic storms of random neural firing that occur in this part of the brain. When such seizures occur in areas dedicated to motor control, the result is the most well-known symptoms of epilepsy, the physical fits and powerful involuntary muscular contractions typical of so-called grand mal seizures. But when seizures occur predominantly in the temporal lobes and thus the limbic system, the predominant effects are not physical, but emotional. Patients say that their "feelings are on fire" (Ramachandran 1998, p. 179), fluctuating wildly from soaring heights of ecstasy to paralyzing depths of terror and fury.

In addition, there is another symptom frequently associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Sufferers of the condition are often hyperreligious: they claim to have profound spiritual and mystical experiences during their seizures; they are obsessively preoccupied with theological issues, churning out meticulously detailed, elaborate and usually incomprehensible text explaining their beliefs (a condition called hypergraphia); they see cosmic significance in trivial everyday events; and they may believe they were visited by God or in God's presence, or that they have been "chosen" (Ramachandran 1998, p. 179-180). Distortions of time and space, including out-of-body experiences, often also occur (Persinger 1987, p. 123; Newberg and D'Aquili 2001, p. 110). The novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is believed to have been a temporal lobe epileptic, wrote that he "touched God" during his seizures (Holmes 2001, p. 27). (all emphases mine)

Naturally, I wondered if this might not also characterize Daniel Tammet's religious experiences.

Here is his description of his first seizure:

I was sitting on the living room floor when it happened. I was four years old and sat with my brother Lee while my father was making dinner in the kitchen. It was not exceptional at that age for me to feel moments of complete disconnection, periods of total self-absorption --- studying closely the lines on the palms of my hands or watching my shifting shadow as I leaned myself back and forth in slow and rhythmic movements. But this was something else, an experience unlike any other, as though the room around me was pulling away from me on all sides and the light inside it leaking out and the flow of time itself coagulated and stretched out into a single lingering moment. I did not and could not have known it then, but I was having a massive epileptic seizure.

And here, for completeness's sake, are his thoughts on religion:

Many people are surprised to learn that I am a Christian. They imagine that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues. It is certainly true that my Asperger's makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn't prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships. In fact, many people with autism do find benefits in religious belief or spirituality. Religion's emphasis on ritual, for example, is helpful for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, who benefit greatly from stability and consistency. In a chapter of her autobiography entitled "Stairway to Heaven: Religion and Belief," Temple Grandin, an autistic writer and professor of animal science, describes her view of God as an ordering force in the universe. Her religious beliefs stem from her experience of working in the slaughter industry and the feeling she had that there must be something sacred about dying.

Like many people with autism, my religious activity is primarily intellectual rather than social or emotional. When I was at secondary school, I had no interest in religious education and was dismissive of the possibility of a god or that religion could be beneficial in people's lives. This was because God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read or heard did not make any sense to me. The turning point came with my discovery of the writings of G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christian beliefs in the early part of the twentieth century.
...
My autism can sometimes make it difficult for me to understand how other people might think or feel in any given situation. For this reason, my moral values are based more on ideas that are logical, make sense to me and that I have thought through carefully, than on the ability to "walk in another person's shoes." I know to treat each person I meet with kindness and respect, because I believe that each person is unique and created in God's image.

I do not often attend church, because I can become uncomfortable with having lots of people sitting and standing around me. However, on the few occasions when I have been inside a church I have found the experience very interesting and affecting. The architecture is often complex and beautiful and I really like having lots of space above my head as I look up at the high ceilings. As in childhood, I enjoy listening to hymns being sung. Music definitely helps me to experience feelings that can be described as religious, such as of unity and transcendence. My favorite song is "Ave Maria." When I hear it, I feel completely wrapped up inside the flow of the music.

So it's fairly clear from these passages that Tammet does not experience the Dostoyevskian bouts of religious ecstasy in his seizures --- the religiosity he describes is much lower-key than that kind of frenzied mysticism. If anything, Tammet's religious experiences are somewhat less mystical and ecstatic than most people's, since he says most of it is intellectual, more like a seventeenth-century philosopher's certainty that a Prime Mover exists than an ongoing personal interaction with said deity. (It is clear from his description of the hymns that he does regularly experience these profound feelings; but he also experiences them in secular contexts, i.e. with numbers. They do not form the basis of his religiosity, and are not confined to the explicitly "spiritual" dimension of his life).

I did find his comments on religion and autism in general fairly interesting. I had assumed that autistic people would not differ significantly in religious affiliation from everyone else, since the factor exerting the single greatest influence over any person's religious affiliation is the religion in which they were brought up.

I still think that's probably the case, although now that I've read his book I am somewhat curious as to the ways in which (most) autistics' religious experiences differ from those of (most) NTs, if they do at all.

Disability Rights and Bodily Autonomy

Shiva has an intriguing post up about assisted suicide and "mercy" killing --- as a libertarian, he is obviously in favor of the former and opposed to the latter. While most of his post is about recent assisted-suicide cases in the UK, and specific details thereof, it's the general principles I want to respond to:

The thing I really want to get to here, though, is the concept of "mercy killing". I want to say, as emphatically as possible, that there is no such thing. If Lynn Gilderdale's mother was actively involved in her death [link], then it was either murder or assisted suicide - if Lynn did not ask her mother to help her take the overdose, then it was the former, and if she did it was the latter. As, according to the Mail report [link], she had twice attempted suicide already by the same method (although it does not say why she was not successful), in this particular case assisted suicide looks more likely - but that doesn't equate to "mercy killing", which term suggests a person being killed, not at their own request, but based on the decision of the killer, not the killed, that killing them would be more "merciful" than letting them live.

That is killing someone against their will, and that, emphatically and undeniably, is murder. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's a worse kind of murder than one motivated by hate, anger or jealousy. Murder with those motives I can understand, but the monstrous twistedness of the mentality of someone who claims to murder someone else out of love utterly terrifies me, so much that I can hardly write coherently about it. A society in which familial love can be twisted into wishing those you love dead, apparently doing so because you love them, is a society there is something deeply, horrifically wrong with.
...
It would logically not need to be said, but probably still bears repeating, that in a libertarian worldview this is totally different from assisting with a person's own decision to end their life, even though (as I said in my previous post on the subject) the mainstream media (and seemingly some parts of the disability rights movement) insist on conflating them.

I said in a comment on his post that I could see being against even assisted suicide from a disability-rights perspective: in the ableist, profoundly stratified society we live in, where access to needed supports is often confined to those who can pay for them, more people may choose to end their lives than would in a more accessible, egalitarian society, and many of those people could not be said to have "chosen" their fate so much as to have been pushed into it by myriad external forces. It is not hyperbole to say that this, if it became widely practiced, would constitute genocide.

This conflict between the individual's right to hir own body and the existence of social conditions that make some choices problematic comes up in a few other issues at the intersection of feminism and disability rights: sterilization, genetic testing and selective abortion.

Most feminists believe that women have the right to absolute reproductive freedom --- that they ought to be free to make whatever choice, for whatever reason, irrespective of whether it's a good reason. That includes the freedom to abort a perfectly viable, uncomplicated pregnancy if she discovers the fetus will be born with a disability. Disability-rights activists, even feminist ones, do not much like that possibility. They condemn prenatal testing for such conditions as Down syndrome, autism and whatever else as eugenic, and abortions sought on the basis of positive results to such tests as genocidal.

In the objections to both assisted suicide and selective abortion, in addition to the immediate concern that any individual's rights are being violated, there's an overarching concern about the direction society will take (with respect to disability rights). Since individual solutions to these problems (of severe disability, prolonged illness, or pregnancy with a disabled fetus) cost society nothing, while systemic solutions (greatly improving the quality and availability of healthcare, reworking infrastructures to make them more accessible, changing cultural attitudes toward disability, etc.), though they are often the best solution, and though they solve the problem once and for all rather than one instance at a time, cost a lot in money, time and effort. Especially with selective abortion, there is a fear that people with whatever disability is being talked about (usually Down syndrome) might become such a tiny numerical minority due to selective abortion that social supports for them will atrophy, having become no longer cost-effective. No choice is made in a vacuum, these critics say, and even when they do not wish to bar women from getting selective abortions, they call on women to realize that their choices, in aggregate, will have effects far beyond their own lives, and to factor the likely impact of different courses of action into their choices.

This same question lies at the heart of the endless quarreling within feminism over pornography and prostitution. How can the right of those women who choose to be sex workers to do whatever they want with their own bodies be squared with the rights of other women who were forced into sex work? Furthermore, how can the right to do sex work be reconciled with the endemic cultural stew of woman-hating imagery of which sex work is part and parcel?

In all of these quandaries, I think the right choice lies in preserving the greatest possible level of individual freedom (in other words, yes, you should be free to decide to die, even if you need help performing the life-ending act; yes, you should be free to get an abortion for whatever reason; and yes, you should be free to use your body however you like, and to choose whatever line of work you want, even if most people wouldn't approve of your choices) while simultaneously pursuing a more equal society with the vigor that comes from knowing that, even with the whole panoply of individual solutions open (theoretically) to all, most people will be restricted by economic, personal and social circumstances to a few bad choices.

Systemic solutions don't destroy people's freedom to pursue individual solutions; they just make it less likely that very many, outside the elite, will do so.

Autism, Suggestibility and Acculturation

Lili Marlene has an interesting post up about cults, wondering if autistics as a group might be less vulnerable to that sort of manipulation:

The thing that I think is interesting about this vile, vile man [Australian cult leader Ken Dyers] is that people described him with terms like "charismatic" etc, and obviously many people must have felt some form of attraction towards this man, who was apparently a paedophile many times over. So why did this guy leave me feeling as cold as a dead fish? Why do I feel that there is no way in the world that I would ever have viewed this man as anything but a self-serving arsehole? According to the results of various tests and questionnaires I have the psychology of a person who has Asperger syndrome. That is supposed to mean that I am socially blind; organically unable to tell a con artiste from a true friend. I'm supposed to have no sense at all when it comes to people. I'm supposed to be unable to understand the good and bad intentions of others. Then why did I find this man, and all of the many people of his type, to be basically yuckity-yuk-yuk? When I meet people like this I just can't get away from them fast enough, because I know, and I'm sure they know just as well, that we are just wasting each other's time, as we can get nothing that we need or desire from each other.
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Am I just kidding myself that I'm so smart? Well, I've never been a member of any group that is anything like a cult. I've been an atheist since late in my religious childhood. But according to all the theories about AS and autism I'm supposed to be ripe for exploitation and as naive as a young child. Perhaps that is true of some autistic people, I don't know. According to the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, men are supposed to have less "social skills" than women, with autists possessing even less social sense than "normal" average males. Then I wonder how Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who is the champion of this theory, would explain why it appeared that females greatly outnumbered males as members of this truly harmful and exploitative Australian cult? Shouldn't these very feminine-looking women with supposedly superior "mind-reading" abilities have had the inborn people-skills to read what was on this dirty old bastard's mind?

Catana pointed out in the comments, and I agree, that cult leaders target potential victims specifically, and "work" particular emotional angles --- we, the outside observers, do not see the same side of those people that their acolytes do. It's therefore misleading to compare our impressions of cult leaders from the glimpses we get on TV with their followers' experiences with them; they're putting on an act for the faithful that they don't bother to put on for the rest of us.

It wasn't cults that Lili's post inspired me to think about, though; it was broader, society-wide patterns of socialization. Social norms, it seems to me, propagate themselves by suggestion: people see other people acting a certain way and learn to act that way themselves, and to think it perfectly natural to act that way, and feel surprised and somewhat repulsed when they see a person doing otherwise. The more insular the group, often, the more outlandish the beliefs and behaviors that emerge (this is where cults and episodes of mass hysteria/mass delusion fit in --- these are not, in my view, exotic psychological phenomena but exaggerated instances of normal acculturation).

Autistic people are well-known for their resistance to socialization: we don't fit in (often, don't even try to fit in) as children; we don't fit gender roles; we don't follow the usual scripts for social encounters. Is this because we're not suggestible? Do ideas coming from other people not penetrate our minds and take hold subconsciously the way they do in most people? Or is it something else, perhaps our failure to imitate others?

Googling "autism and suggestibility" brought me two studies from 2007, both testing the susceptibility of autistic children to suggestion of false memories. The first study had 24 Aspie schoolchildren and 27 age-, sex- and IQ-matched NT children watch a scene involving two actors pretending to be visiting artists coming to photograph the children, then try to remember specific details about what had happened the next day. Their recall was tested several ways: first, by a "free recall," where the interviewer just sat there and let the children tell everything they remembered; next, the interviewer asked questions to jog their memories (both general questions like "What were [the visitors] wearing?" and specific ones like "When the woman had trouble with the [camera] tripod, what did she say?"); and, finally, the interviewers asked leading questions based on false assumptions (like, "What color was the man's scarf?" when he wasn't wearing a scarf) after briefing the children that it was OK to say they didn't know or to correct the interviewer if he or she got something wrong.

Where that study tested suggestibility in eyewitness memory, the second looked at autobiographical memory. This study had 30 children on the autism spectrum and 38 age-matched NT children split into two groups (a younger group with an average age of around 7, and an older group with an average age of 9) answer questions about events they experienced, first about events in their lives prior to participating in the experiment and then about an event (a magic show) put on by the researchers. An interviewer asked them, first, to tell her everything they remembered about the magic show, and then began to ask specific, leading questions, half of which contained false assumptions.

Both studies found that the autistic children were just as suggestible as their NT peers; their memories of events, whether merely witnessed or actually experienced directly, were equally likely to be influenced by leading questions. So it's not suggestibility per se that underlies the obliviousness to social cues that characterizes autism.

Given identical levels of suggestibility in autistics and NTs, I'm going to have to modify my theory a bit: it's not that we're resistant to suggestion in general, it's that we don't perceive as many things as suggestions as NTs do. Both of the above experiments featured very clear-cut scenarios: the interviewers were asking questions about actual events, and the wording of some of the questions introduced misleading details. This is a much more explicit interaction than many of those that constitute the ongoing process of becoming a fully socialized member of one's own culture. In those, the suggestions are often entirely unspoken urges to imitate certain people (and avoid certain others). There was a bit of confirming evidence for this hypothesis in the eyewitness-memory study: one of the elements in the short scene the actors pretending to be photographers performed was something the researchers termed a "socially salient sub-scene": the actors would be trying to use a tape measure, and the man would pretend to hurt his hand and get angry, and the woman would apologize, and ultimately they would abandon their tape-measuring project altogether, such was the anxiety it caused their characters. Now, when the children were asked to describe whatever came into their heads about the scene the next day, the NT children focused more on this sub-scene than on the "neutral" sub-scene, and in this preference they differed markedly from the AS children. The NTs' attention was drawn selectively to the social and emotional content of this scene, while to the AS children it was just another set of events.

I think this lack of selective attention to the social significance of events goes a long way toward explaining our relative resistance to socialization. It is not a complete resistance, as I've argued before with respect to gender, but it's enough to distinguish us.

By way of analogy, it might be interesting to compare how much the average autistic person remembers from school (or from recreational research!) with how much the average NT remembers. I find that I have retained a whole lot of knowledge from high school, while to a lot of people my age it's just a blur. If they remember high school, they're more likely to remember what their lives were like, who their friends and crushes were, and what they did on the weekends than what they learned in class. For me, it tends to be the other way around. I told my mom, when she marveled at how much I could recall, that it was only because I perceived so much less in high school that I remembered so many details: with fewer streams of data going in, you can devote more energy to retaining each one than if you were trying to attend to zillions of different channels at once, as most NTs do.