Neurotypical Peers Less Willing to Interact with Autistics

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New paper in Nature:

Link: Neurotypical Peers are Less Willing to Interact with Those with Autism based on Thin Slice Judgments

Apparently, regular folk tend to automatically form negative judgements of those with autism and so have less interest in interacting with, leading to autistics having less practice in social interaction and so being less skilled in it.

To which, I must admit, my immediate response was: well, duh!

Still, it's nice to see science catching up and confirming something I thought was self-evident.

Science: confirming the obvious since the last turn of the millennium.

interesting. i didn't know Nature published human studies.

NOT ALL OF US ARE THE SAME WAY!! ! That magazine is assuming, which I hate.

But for those of us that are socially like that, I'll say that it's a natural and logical consequence of being a minority, of having a different style... a different style of communication.

It's like disliking someone because you don't like the color of their skin. Senseless.

Who is "us"? Autistics? Or neurotypicals?

The paper is about the first impressions neurotypicals form of people — using presentations of matched sets of autistics and neurotypicals to see if there are any differences. These first impressions were based on photographs, short audio recordings, short silent movies, short sound movies, and short written transcripts of what the participants said.

As such, the study is about neurotypicals — who were found to consistently rate the autistic participants as less likeable, less approachable, and more awkward, though not as less intelligent or less trustworthy, interestingly enough. This was the case for every form of presentation except the written transcripts, where there was no noticeable difference between the first impressions formed of the members of the two groups.

They also indicated they were less likely to want to engage in conversation, sit next to, or live next door to the autistic participants.

The authors suggest that this reluctance based on first impressions means that those with autism get less social engagement and, as a consequence, less practice in developing their social skills. This does not seem an unreasonable conclusion.

Do all neurotypicals form similar first impressions? Probably not. But enough of them do that a consistent pattern can be found across three separate studies.

I don't see that the paper is assuming either all neurotypicals or all autistics are the same, so I'm not really sure where your comment is coming from.

I also like the authors' suggestion that more work needs to be done to identify what features the neurotypicals are responding to, since the first impression occurs with still photographs, moving images, sound recordings, and full audio-visual movies. What is it about autistics that triggers this? It can't be the usual things cited — eye contact, obsessive interests, lack of social awareness — since the presentations are not long enough or interactive enough for any of those to become evident.