A "Theory of Mind" rant...

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I have difficulty telling a person's intents, just by listening to them.
It's the reason i have problems with the banality of "please" and "thank you"
they're just words, and they don't mean anything, because you can say them so easily and not mean anything, and from the perspective of someone who can't or won't read into the words.... they're empty.

I have to judge people on their actions, When i see their actions, i can see in "how" they do them, and "why" they do them, whether they're sincere or not... at least i can do it that way far better than by listening to so empty words.

If a person tries to be as concise in their words as I am... whether for the good or bad, I do tend to give them more weight.
The quicker a reply the less i trust it.
But those are all just coping mechanisms to make up for the fact that I can't get out of people's words what NT's can get out of people's words.

I still having read this whole thread have a hard time understanding the connection between the mentioned article and the concept of ToM though. ToM would be more to do with the article than with the use of the term as throughout this thread. To me, it's not about understanding that others have a separate and distinct mind from my own, it's the source of what makes me view myself as a self-conscious individual. What the article calls an impairment... well, if it makes you less likely to ascribe things to a divine... that's a clarification.. not an impairment.
Do Aspies have less temporal lobe activity? Are we less prone to temporal lobe epilepsy? Because if the study itself is valid (ignoring the biased conclusions taken from it) then it points to a direction to look for the causes/effects of ASD's. Temporal lobes.... I think it's about time i start doing some real research on that part of the brain.

When someone is upset and crying my young NV Autistic son will look very sad and then cry himself, would that be his ToM not being able to differentiate himself as a separate entity from other people? Its not just the noise of it; no other noises make him cry.

I didn't know what Theory of Mind was until 10 minutes ago. I have no comment on the higher power issue, but do they really think people on the spectrum have NO concept of other people's thoughts?

I'm definitely not a mind reader and the more I think about it I do have a lot of trouble understanding what other people are thinking if they don't tell me, but that doesn't mean I don't realize that other people have different thoughts and feelings than I do. Just because I don't know what those thoughts ARE, doesn't mean I think that everyone thinks the same way I do.

How impaired do they think Aspies are when it comes to TOM?

I'm very interested.

Is this an example of ToM?

I went to the Customer Service counter in our grocery market to buy a lottery ticket. There were a lot of people milling around in front of the counter in no particular order that I could determine. The lottery section, with tickets and a cash register was at the left end of the counter, further up, in the middle of the counter was another cash register and a clerk behind the counter was waiting on a customer there. Two elderly female customers who appeared to be together, were standing in front of the lottery section, one kind of leaning on the counter. I asked the woman behind the counter if there were two lines or one line? She didn’t answer, either didn’t hear me, or was too busy to respond. The elderly woman who was leaning on the counter said “I’m not in line.” But that was not an answer to my question. Again I asked “Are there two lines or one?” and my question this time was directed to the group of customers. The other elderly woman said, “She’s not in line,” referring to her companion who had already told me she was not in line.

Most of the people just ignored me or shrugged their shoulders, but one woman piped up, “How can there be two lines, there is only one clerk behind the counter?” I thought that was rather a rude thing to say, and also that it lacked logic, because there was a door which leads to an office behind the customer service desk and that door was closed. I said back to her, “Well how am I supposed to know? Another clerk could have stepped into the office for a moment.” To that the woman’s eyes got big and she threw her head back a notch as if I had said something offensive to her.

By this time I was thoroughly annoyed with the whole lot of them and walked away thinking they were a bunch of idiots. All I wanted was an answer to my question; “Are there two lines or one?” In my mind, the answer to my question very simply should have been one of three, “Yes”, “No” or “I don’t know”. That’s how I would have answered that question if it was directed to me as a member of the group. Is expecting a direct answer to a direct question the same as thinking that other people think and respond the way I think and respond ? This kind of thing happens to me all the time.

I have to admit I am very confused by all of this. When I first read about the experiment with the bears and the jellybean a while back, the only possibility that I could think of for why a kid would give the wrong answer is that as kids we are confronted by so many situations in which everyone else seems to know something we don't, so I might figure that the bear knew where the jellybean really was, because other people just seem to know these things. Since I was never tested that way as a kid, I don't know what my own answer would have been.

I know that I lack some subtle understanding of how other people think from situations I've been in. A couple of years ago I had a close group of friends online, and one of them decided she wanted to shut me out of the group, and she shunned me in this typical girl-bullying way. First she disappeared from the forum where we hung out, then I found her holding court somewhere else, and when I reacted by being terribly hurt and angry, suddenly no one was willing to talk to me anymore. I found out later that she had set me up by telling everyone that I had a problem with her and that I had been mean to her all along (which in my mind was not at all true), so that when I finally got upset, it was all the proof anyone needed of my "badness", The thing that left me completely puzzled and extremely hurt was that not one person took my side, and they all are still convinced that I am beyond the pale. I am still utterly confused about how this happened.

Quoting Marshall

I tend to have one point to make with theory of mind, at least as described in the wikipedia example. (btw Baron-Cohen has replaced the theory of mindblindness with the Empathizing-systemizing_theory )