Asperger's and decision-making skills
Here's one area that can confound a lot of us Aspies...in the workplace or personal life...all about making decisions. Having come to "know myself", I have taken to sketching things out and picking my top 3-5 choices, then my decision criteria, then who might be impacted, and assessing the risk or consequences...I find that helps me see "the big picture" and identify unintended negative consequences, and can help stimulate that sort of thinking, but it is still not as fluid or quick as the NT processing of decisions. So I avoid telling them my method, especially at work. I'm not in a management position, but find that I have to make decisions from time to time, and have been criticized on a couple of occasions for opening up a "can of worms"which luckily never became full-blown, but it cast doubt on my ability to make sensible judgements.
Funny thing is, if you give me a multiple choice test, and say "what would you do in this situation?" I can get the vast majority of them right, without thinking too much about it. And these are not straightforward situations either.
I see decision-making ability as a triad of elements: 1) book-smarts, 2) experience, and 3) intuition. It's the last one we lack, but it's the one that so many NT's are big on, and the one that apparently matters most. I find that I need more of #1 and #2 over a longer period of time to be at par, and even then, due to difficulties in generalizing, I have to rely on more "hard drive storage" than processing speed. What can the rest of you say to #1 and #2 contributing to enhancing #3 - is it a "broken"correlation for us Aspies, or just a very impaired connection, or some other connection?
I have an absolutely terrible time making decisions. I go on for days and weeks sometimes making up my mind. Sometimes I think I'm working with too much data to come to a firm conclusion. However I know that's where my only advantage lies, I know I am not a fast thinker, and I can't work out social problems in real time, but only in hindsight. So knowing more than most people and learning from experience is vital to make up for what I lack.
For me, 1 and 2 have definitely helped 3. I learn a social behavior exists, choose to apply it, and eventually it becomes instinct. With all of the knowledge of social situations stored on my mental hard drive, I can adapt to new situations more easily than I used to. With enough practice, something like eye contact becomes 50% acting and 50% instinct for me. I feel like I'm able to socialize with the part of the brain NTs use more than I used to. I think my social intuition has improved as well, but then again, I do have an expansive mental textbook of social rules (and exceptions) and I still feel very uncomfortable in certain settings. I don't have a high amount of sensory overload or fear of crowds; big parties might overwhelm my senses but not to the extent of many other Aspies, and I've overcome a lot of my social anxiety.
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