T.O.M.- Past, Present, and Future

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I realized something about Theory of Mind when I was replying in another thread. I am pretty good at imagining how someone would feel in a situation I know about, either that they are currently in, or that they have been in. There are varying degrees of how empathetic I am able to feel or am willing to feel, of course, but by and large I may be better at past and present TOM, or empathy, than perhaps even a lot of NTs seem to be.

HOWEVER, I am bad at guessing how people will react to what I say in the future. This is obviously a hard thing to gauge anyway, so I don't know if this is a TOM deficiency or just the result of being a human without precognition.

What do you guys think/what is your experience?

By the way, Click here to read about Theory of Mind if you do not know what it is. Though from my understanding TOM also involves the ability to guess what others are feeling and will do, or is at least associated.

Good question. I don't really know. There are three or four people I know well enough to predict their reactions to what I say, but with everyone else I frequently find their reactions surprising. I'm not sure if this is an everyone thing or just an aspie thing, but I'm inclined to think that the fact I have to figure out consciously and carefully how people might react to what I say is an aspie thing.

TOM has confused me for a long time...

Alot of what NTs can do mentally, are hardwired in... But with Aspies, I think, we have to learn everything... And we get good at learning (even if we don't know it), so we can actually learn a person, and learn how they'd react. I can almost predict with 100% accuracy how my Mum would react to something I did. But a complete stranger... Now I could probably do it, but a few years ago it may have been a tough ask...

GA

I find my TOM becomes average to superior when I am in the observer's POV. When I am in the "heat of battle" I fair far worse.

All of the above is because there are two aspects to ToM. One is cognitive, where you have the knowledge of reactions and responses. The other is relational/reciprocal, where you project your own emotional experience onto the other person and predict their behavior based on how you think they would feel. Over the course of time, you practice this over and over and what happens is you perceive something and have an automatic response.

This process breaks down if you are unable to read faces, or if you have some other processing issues that interfere with knowing others' emotional responses as well as your own.

The end product is someone who looks empathetic when there is sufficient time to engage in the incredibly slow cognitive process of reading/predicting emotions and responding to them. When the response time is shortened, say in conversation (fast) or argument (faster) or crisis (fastest), the degree of empathy perceived will be related to your fastest cognitive processing time.

NTs do this automatically which is both a disadvantage and an advantage. The advantage is that conversation is often more efficient. The disadvantage is that since the process is not cognitive, it is less rational, hence some really stupid behaviors like hate.

I suspect that most people with autistic patterns of social interaction have more cognitive than relational empathic skills.
I have hypothesized a third aspect of ToM based on my own and others' experience of these skills breaking down when there is more or less energy/motivation to devote to processing. This would explain why both coaching and floortime techniques work, as well as the reason they work differently. My selfish motivation is that I want the relational skill.

It always amazes me that theorists and researchers seem to have such poor pattern recognition skills. I am still looking for someone to be writing about this.

Do people have 'hardwired' empathic skills? I am not inclined to think so. Most of how we react to each other is based on normative constructions and submission to external pressures to evince those behaviours that others around someone find useful, anticipate or expect.

I am reasonably sure that I have Theory of Mind, but that does not mean I can 'second guess' people's reactions all the time, except in the most obvious of situations. Admittedly, I used to be far more socially inept than I am now, though there are ineptitudes that come to play and they really become noticeable under stress or when several things are happening at once. I have in the past been hauled over the coals for emitting 'incorrect' responses when under pressure. I am a lot better at it now than I used to be. The problem doesn't arise much these days because I have very little contact with others.

In a similar vein - the cue of when to 'take turns' in conversation comes up, I will sometimes talk over someone if I consider that they are doing the same to me. This is done to get my point across and keep the conversation on track more than anything else. This latter point comes down more to being anti-social than having a cognitive deficit, since I could equally attribute a cognitive deficit to those who try to 'speak over' me when on the phone. I actually don't like phonecalls that much for this very reason.