Just realized something...

Post Reply New Topic

Part of the reason why we may lack a so-called theory of the mind is this: It's not that we can't place ourselves in someone else's shoes, it's that we don't assign intentions, and probably for good reason as our intentions tend to be atypical. Let's explain it this way: The idea behind someone saying something offensive is not so much the words themselves as the intent ( or at least that's how it's supposed to be ). Now, if you have an innocent intent and place yourself in someone else's shoes about it, you wouldn't find it offensive as your intent was innocent. However, the other person would use their goddamn theory of the mind to assign a malicious intent to what you said and would thus take offensive. So really the lack of theory mind illustrates that it cannot exist not due to a lack of imagination or whatever the goddamn explaination is, but simply because the perspective is not the same, so assigning ones own perspective to an NTs does not work. NTs seem to have similar intents, but this may be an illusion created by one thing: subconscious body language. This makes it possible to assign intents to people as their is a subconscious language that communicates the intents. Take it out and the system breaks on both sides. The complete lack of the system is actually better than when the system is dysfunctioning because one person is using it and the other person is not. That's at least the explanation I have as of now.

When I was little, my mom said, "How would you feel if someone did "X" to you?" And I took that literally and applied my feelings to everyone else, as in if someone laughed at me and said, "You look like a weirdo," to me, it would hurt my feelings; therefore if I laugh and say someone looks like a weirdo, it will hurt their feelings.

What I didn't realize is that not everybody would find that offensive all the time. The context is what's important.

I didn't figure that out until I was in my 20s, when someone said something to me that sounded mean, but it was something I'd never heard before--some weird saying like, "Wish in one hand, s*** in the other and see which one fills up first." So I laughed, and asked her where she'd heard it.

Excellent post, Ganondox. I can see how that explanation also covers how NTs screw up knowing other NTs intentions all the time, they're picking up those body language cues that each person uses a little differently. Depending on gender, a slight smile could mean several things, for example. NTs mess up all the time, we are just not aware of it. I prefer being clueless, it's hard knowing half of a language and speaking a third of it (relating to social language), so I just go with the fact that I don't really know.

I definitely agree with what you are saying. Putting myself in someone elses shoes certainly helped me a lot to understand that other people have feelings but I didn't really get until recently that their motivations and desires might be different than mine, therefore how THEY respond will be different then how I will. This has just left me more confused but less surprised by the way people act.

I think this is why I am generally trusting and thing people have good intentions because that's the way I am.