Talk:Mind-blindness

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 8 January 2020 and 25 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Fdaleo.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Untitled

I am still unhappy with the "inborn" statement about body language, but after rewording it I feel that I don't need to add the {{Fact}} tag back. It still needs a citation though. And telling me to do a google search is pointless, I'm not the person who wants that statement on there (though I do feel that there is now nothing really wrong with it anymore) and it needs to be a reliable source, not just a random site found with google (though it might find a reliable result it isn't guaranteed).

It is good that the other statement now has a source though. Raoul Harris 15:44, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Unempathic

The article needs to distinguish how this term is different from "unempathic" or "lacking empathy". "Mind blind" is one of those modern terms that could mean several things, like blind to their own emotions, but doesen't. It has been adopted for it's rhyming cuteness factor, despite the ambiguity, and typifies the fuzzy thinking that drives so much writing these days. 68.164.88.178 10:05, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Fuzzy thinking sums Simon Baron-Cohen up pretty well. Terminology of a dumbass from a doctor that is a dumbass. 62.106.52.93 (talk) 05:53, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

The article states

Mind-blindness is the opposite of empathy.

Questionable - I think one could make quite a clear distinction : theory of mind concerns awareness of another person's knowledge or thoughts ; empathy concerns awareness of another person's emotions or feelings. I have no expertise - looking into "Emotional Intelligence" and Autism - hoping to find answers here, rather than provide them !

--87.194.174.252 (talk) 13:26, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

If mind blindness is an disorder, is the normal condition mind awareness (which has not been defined)? Article is vague and speculative and provides no answers nor raises any questions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.132.112.200 (talk) 00:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Editing attention needed here

I'm uncomfortable with the inclusion of this topic in [[Category:Nonverbal communication]] - can someone explain to me how it fits?

Also, this seems like a stub that should be merged into some other article and replaced with a redirect. Any thoughts? What other article handles this topic? Cbdorsett 08:59, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. I can see no big difference between Mind blindness and grave unempathy, as noted by 68.164.88.178.

The closest related topic I see is the psychogenic view of autism.

Psychohistorians believe that the most regressive modes of childrearing cause extreme lack of empathy in humans. You can also take a look at the non biological theories of schizophrenia.

The article should be merged but I don’t know where.

—Cesar Tort 05:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I changed my mind. This subject merits an article on its own. —Cesar Tort 06:09, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I have added a major edit which needs cleaning, I am not good at wiki editing. The style might be unacceptable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tchannon (talk • contribs) 00:57, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Deleted a crazy sentence in the introductory lines stating that a mindblind individual cannot have beliefs and desires. The rest of the article is also in bad need of revision. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.240.145.144 (talk) 14:16, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

The article itself is in dire need of attention from somebody who is knowledgeable about the subject, and who will actually rewrite the article so it discusses mind-blindness instead of autism. I'm not particularly knowledgeable--my familiarity with developmental is only involved with my own particular focus within psychology--but I do know that a good portion of the article is rather absurd. Mind-blindness would qualify as a cognitive defect, sort of like a scratch that in this case would cause the person to have a defective theory of mind. It would never really work as a sole cause of autism--given how early autism can be detected, now, it is vastly more likely that autism could cause it. The lack of a physical basis is a bit of a non-issue as well; most of the functions involved can be traced to the frontal lobes. Several of the conditions it's associated with have, in turn, an association with frontal lobe damage. Getting it firmer would take getting people who are known to have had a normal theory of mind but lost it due to neurological trauma and hope that the damage is not so diffuse as to prevent anything beyond a generalized region. This is not research that is easily and quickly done! 75.177.89.14 (talk) 04:13, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Neutrality is also an issue - the article presents theories as facts and fails to attribute certain arguments/suggestions by authors inline, among other problems. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:01, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Has those issues been addressed? It's 2020 and I'm getting the same feel. EmGaGa (talk) 09:53, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

When an Autism consultant put mind-blindness theory at the top of the list of reference material for me to read, to help me learn more about my children, I was expecting something more realistic than this. I know the authors who came up with it had to justify their wages and/or research grants but rarely have I come across more nonsense, clearly written by people with little empathy for the amazing workings of autistic minds. With 'normal' brains exhibiting so little empathy, from whom are those supposedly lacking supposed to learn? This comes across as ill informed and patronising guesswork, it really shouldn't be here at all, let alone presented as a set of scientific facts.

An autistic's suggestion

Consider my perspective as a high-order autistic. (High-order is itself offensive in that it asserts the existence of low-order autistics; i.e. low-order Humans. But there ya go.)

I read elsewhere about autistics being labeled mind-blind, so a quick google search brought me to this page. Once here, the first thing that happened was that my cursor accidentally highlighted the word autism. Imagine my surprise seeing the photo of a child building a tower of cans as representing autism.

How many American children don’t build towers with blocks? With Legos? With—don’t scream—with cans? Are you telling Wikipedia readers to unconsciously associate all children who build towers with autism? Do you understand how offended autistics are by such efforts to minimalize and degrade autism? Do you understand the harm you’re doing to leave these gross errors unchallenged?

What you call autism is an externalized expression of an alternative way of wiring the brain. That’s all. Are there autistics who are severely handicapped? Yup. What percentage of autistics are severely handicapped? Is the percentage of severely handicapped autistics roughly the same as severely handicapped normals? Further, what percentage of autistics are severely gifted? Is the percentage of severely gifted autistics roughly the same as severely gifted normals? Is there anyone who argues that Einstein wasn’t autistic? If so, on what basis? When I read the APA’s bible, DSM-5, I see a grocery list of autism indicators, most of which describe Einstein. Why aren’t high-order autistics part of the conversation? Have you asked any autistics for their input? Has anyone who is involved in this Wikipedia article so much as read the DSM-5 descriptions and criteria? I doubt it, and yet the severely miseducated are here encouraged to continue miseducating the uneducated.

Further still, connecting mind blindness with autistics is precisely the same as connecting low IQ with black people. Consideration: there are ZERO mind-blind people in the world, other than possibly those who have phenomenologically proved brain damage. Mind blindness is cocktail party gibberish.

Simon Baron-Cohen’s dark-age assertion of the mind-blindness theory of autism will be remembered in history as similar to the Dred Scott decision and phrenology. This guy was knighted? Who knighted him, Himmler or Hitler? He isn’t the worst example of intelligence misapplied, but he’s high on the current list.

Please recognize that your article contributes to the de-education of Humanity.

2601:407:8501:5F00:BCEE:CAF9:DE2D:2790 (talk) 12:30, 7 May 2021 (UTC) F Stephen Foster, self-affirming autistic.

Ableist, inaccurate, and poorly researched

I'm Autistic, a clinician working with autistic people, and a researcher studying autism and this is truly a shockingly ableist, biased, and unempirical article. I don't even know where to begin. I'll do some editing but I haven't done it before and I'm overwhelmed by how harmful this is. Is there a way to remove articles from public view while they're being fixed?Rainbowtriceratops (talk) 23:47, 10 January 2022 (UTC)cbm73

Addressed article issues

I have reviewed all the citations and rewrote the article. Many of them were pointing to incorrect or false claims. In particular, many citations were claiming that "x or y correlates with mindblindness", in most of them mindblindness was a citation and not mentioned in the main article (example), in some of them it was not mentioned at all. I have searched for replacement citations where possible.

The section on schizophrenia was making a particularly strange claim, that "partial mindblindness" is possible resulting from impaired theory of mind --- this is contrary to all the black and white definitions of "mindblindness" in the research I read from Baron-Cohen who seems to be the main proponent of the theory who stayed with it after its loss in popularity. Not a single citation in the section discussed schizophrenia and mindblindness in the same article! At best, this section was a novel synthesis of information (WP:OR), equating partial deficiencies in ToM to complete loss in ToM.

Oh, and the section on children had nothing to do with mind-blindness. :shrug:

example: Brune, M. (1 January 2005). ""Theory of Mind" in Schizophrenia: A Review of the Literature". Schizophrenia Bulletin. 31 (1): 21–42. doi:10.1093/schbul/sbi002. PMID 15888423.

Darcyisverycute (talk) 09:55, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Heterogeneity of autism

@Darcyisverycute: Here you added the following paragraph to the introduction:

Since the development of strong evidence to demonstrate the heterogeneity of autism and many failed replications of classic ToM studies, mind-blindness has been generally rejected by the scientific community.

I don't see how the claim regarding the heterogeneity is supported by the sources. The paper by Brock et al. refers to heterogeneity with respect to presentation and individual characteristics ("every autistic person is different"), the paper by Mottron and Bzdok does not discuss mind-blindness or ToM at all and covers heterogeneity "at the imaged brain and etiology levels" as well, and the paper by Gernsbacher and Yergenau that has since been added is only concerned with replication studies and empirical evidence for mind-blindness.

It is indeed the case that both the idea that mind-blindness is the defining feature or "cause" of autism was quickly shown to be wrong, a view that even Baron-Cohen dropped quickly (see e.g. Boucher 2012, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361311430403), that there is ample evidence that performance on ToM tasks differs widely between autistic people, and that it is questionable how the studied ToM tasks can provide evidence the idea of mind-blindness or other notions of impaired/lack of ToM in the first place.

I'd appreciate if you could provide a source or clarify the statement. It might already help to more precisely define the term "heterogeneity".

@Cflam01: Perhaps you would like to weigh in here as well. Thanks!--TempusTacet (talk) 12:12, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the mention. For now I have expanded on it a little bit and I invite you to review and improve it. Cflam01 (talk) 13:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. Been a while since I've been on Wiki, and I think this was one of the first articles I rewrote, so please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.

I believe what I meant when writing at the time is the heterogeneous etiology, not the heterogeneous presentations of ASD. So I suppose you are right about the Brock et al. citation not being relevant there, although both the citation and the distinct property of autism having heterogeneous presentations could still hold relevance in the article elsewhere. Failed replications of the theory are separate from evidence showing heterogeneous etiology, because proof of the heterogeneous etiology seems to come about through genetics and neuroscience rather than behavioral tests. And the replication of ToM studies is entirely behavioral tests.

I will try to sum up mind-blindness theory as three main claims:

(1) a lack of ToM is considered equivalent to a lack of both cognitive and affective empathy.

(2) A slowed ToM development in childhood causes autism to develop later in life

(3) Autistic people lack ToM

As far as I can tell, all three of these claims have considerable evidence against them, hence my original and current preference for the strong wording "mind-blindness [theory] has been generally rejected by the scientific community". As you also say, (2) is generally believed to be disproven, which is what I think I intended the paragraph to say: because mind blindness in the form of claim (2) is a homogeneous etiological theory of autism, and autism has been shown to have a very heterogeneous etiology, the theory doesn't hold its own weight in light of the new evidence - and to my best knowledge, autism researchers also understand this. You seem to also understand this, and on skimming it, your citation looks like a good addition (except for the fact that it's closed access).

My understanding is, the more prevalent 'mind blindness hypothesis' now, is that autistic people lack a theory of mind, ie. claim (3). Which is to my understanding also thoroughly disproved in an already present in-text citation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/).

I agree it's worth clarifying the difference between heterogeneous presentation and heterogeneous etiology in-article. The former on its own does not disprove claim (2), but the latter does.

(2) is a hypothesis for a homogeneous etiology which is thoroughly disproven. (1) isn't really disproven just by showing that ASD has heterogenous etiology, but there is apparently separate neurological evidence against (1) in the ToM article on Wikipedia - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811905005112, which could be additionally supported with the more recent review:

Dvash, J., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2014). Theory of mind and empathy as multidimensional constructs: Neurological foundations. Topics in Language Disorders, 34(4), 282-295.

PS: I am really hoping I'll find the time to edit more on Wiki in during my PhD. I remember how much fun I had reading all the sources and learning to re-write articles like this a year ago. Darcyisverycute (talk) 23:43, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi Darcyisverycute, Thank you for taking the time to elaborate! I agree that mind-blindness lacks evidence and is widely seen as having been superseded.

However, I do not see how a heteregeneous etiology disproves the idea that an impaired ToM or a delayed development of ToM could be the defining feature or a main cause of autism. Suppose that there is a specific "neurological system" that is required to be able to develop ToM (this is also what the review by Dvash/Shamay-Tsoory implies in its abstract, I have yet to read the full paper). Then, every genetic variation that prevents this system from developing or impairment to that system would result in a lack of ToM and mind-blindness claims that this in turn would lead to autism. The precise nature of that impairment wouldn't matter, e.g., which part of the system is missing. (As an analogy: Functional legs are required in order to be able to walk. The fact that there are many different conditions and circumstances that lead to legs losing their function does not disprove this claim.)

In my understanding, it has convincingly been demonstrated that lack of ToM does not lead to autism. The strongest evidence is that neurotypical children typically fully develop ToM around four years of age, while autistic behavior can be observed in much younger children and neurotypical children do not exhibit autistic behavior prior to developing ToM (see Boucher 2012). (Note that this doesn't say anything about ToM in autistic people, as you've already pointed out.)

In reading up on ToM and mind-blindness, aside from this Wikipedia article, I haven't come across the claim that the neurological and genetic heterogeneity of autism as an argument against mind-blindness or "lack of ToM" in autistic people. Hence I would like to see an explicit discussion of that connection elsewhere. (I'm very open to be convinced that there are people arguing for such a connection and to be shown that my understanding outlined above is heavily flawed!)--TempusTacet (talk) 08:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)