Opacity and transparency in human relations

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There is always discussion about Aspies having difficulty interpreting what other people say, think, do, and feel.

What I want to know is, how can you ever really understand what someone else is thinking or feeling unless they tell you? Otherwise , all we can do is surmise. That leaves us in the worst position. We want factuality, certitude, truthfulness, and sincerity.

Isn't that why we are forthright or blunt?

The interesting thing about being forthright, (bring out your thesaurus), is it is synonymous with 'undisguised', 'unmistakable', and 'transparent'. I desire transparency. In my case, I think the root of many of my Aspie problems comes down to feeling like a transparent soul who must live in a world governed by opaque people and their opaque bureaucracies. I think there would be nothing 'wrong' with me/I would have no problems, if the mechanisms of human interactions and society were transparent.

There are all sorts of tests on measuring our degree of empathy, or our ability to have/make friends, and how well we can read/interpret other people. But I question the validity of them. Who makes these tests? I think that these tests overlook a very important thing - aren't these questions, questions posed by people from a non-Aspie perspective, and therefore containing many assumptions which an Aspie probably isn't aware of?

For example, I was just considering how I interpret and therefore answer the questions according to my understanding of the situations presented. It occurred to me, though, that maybe these questions assume you have the understanding that they are based upon cultural/societal conventions, and not based upon any inherent understanding. err...maybe I can clarify this with an example.

In the Friendship Quotient test a question:
11. It doesn’t bother me too much if I am late meeting a friend.
I answered 'strongly agree' - based upon my inherent understanding. But now I wonder if the question should be answered upon an 'acquired' set of assumptions, those cultural conventions that other people take for granted. So the question turns into something different:

My interpretation:
Am I bothered If I'm late meeting a friend?

Other interpretation:
Do you care at all, that you've upset your friend by being late to meet him/her?

My interpretation is literal. The other is based upon an awareness of assumptions. Maybe, for some people, it is apparent that the second example, is the real question being asked. If this is the real question being asked, then why don't they say so? Again, the division between things being transparent or opaque. I think all counsellors, psychologists, and psychiatrists should take compulsory courses in semantics or something. They have no appreciation for the precise.

Opacity carries over into every area of our lives. Why am I so messed up? Because people use a gobbledygook code with which to communicate to each other (verbally, textually, behaviourally...), and I was born without the right encryption and decryption program. The area where this is worst (but can also be the best/most transparent), is in personal - intimate - relationships. Hence, I don't even go near enough to them to poke a stick.

Not only do people not say what they mean, they say the opposite of what they mean, or they don't want to or are unable to tell you what they mean. And I'm supposed to figure this out, how? It makes my mind and emotions feel like its a pole rat trying to give birth to an elephant. It makes sense, doesn't it, that we have meltdowns, overloads.... All these 'conventional' ways of communicating and interacting are messed-up in the first place, so of course, when they reach us we become completely messed-up.

Some people say that Aspies should learn the conventional ways of how to function in society. We should learn the dominant 'language'/code. We should assimilate ourselves into the dominant society. Well, maybe I can, and am learning a bit. But, I think people can likewise learn a lot by using our language, by learning the value of transparency, and by giving us the tolerance and room to be ourselves rather than flattening us down with a big bulldozer of homogeneity. Raise high those banners for heterogeneity, I say.

So, yeah...what are your thoughts on this whole opacity/transparency business?

Of course. But life doesn't work that way. If we were all Aspie, one might think that would fix the problem, but Aspies are notoriously reticent, especially when it comes to their personal lives and their feelings. We never express our thoughts well enough for others to understand, either -- not even to other Aspies. One might think another Aspie would already somehow 'know,' but if we're dense when it comes to NT speech, trying to read another person with AS is even harder to do.



At first I was about to disagree with this, mainly because Im an intensely reclusive and private person, but on further thought, this feeling of opacity you mention holds merit in that one of the primary reasons I am so reclusive is because I have the pervasive feeling that everyone else in the whole world can read me like a book. I've enough life experience to know this isn't true, but nevertheless I can't escape the notion that people can somehow see through me. I gather this is why I avoid eye contact (the whole 'eyes are the windows of the soul' idea), as this feels invasive. Like you, I have always wished that others were as 'transparent' as I apparently thought I was, but then when the realization finally hit me that not everyone else looked at the world the same way I did, this actually brought about a small measure of comfort. If I couldn't see into them then it's very possible (logically speaking) that they cannot see into me, either.



Yes, they're written in a non-Aspie perspective. Aspies tend to get more involved with the 'black and white' sciences rather than the 'hazy grey' science of Psychology. (Not all, but most prefer the formulaic solidity of math, chemistry, etc). Psychology, on the other hand, is fluid and ever-changing. In my view there are several different kinds of Asperger Syndrome, depending on the influence of personality disorders that may accompany it and right brain/left brain dominance in a given individual, as well as different traits according to gender. People scoff at that right now, but I'm confident that in the coming years DSM criteria will change and redefine AS and other autistic spectrum disorders as we know them now.



True, I agree with your interpretation, but this falls more along the lines of dissecting language in search of intent. I agree that the question can be misunderstood and to an Aspie who prides themselves on exactitude, the question can be taken several ways. An average neurotypical has a built-in 'filter' that Aspies don't have (or don't use, whichever the case may be) and can divine the true intent of the question. When I glanced at it, I wondered if the question was intended to reveal if I was A., unconcerned about the feelings of my friend, or B.) if it bothers me if I'm late. That's a hard question to answer if your language filter doesn't work properly. It would bother me if I hurt my friend's feelings, but at the same time, I tend to be unconcerned if I'm late. How would I answer this question? It would have to be 'Both.' But if that answer isn't available (which it wouldn't be because the writer of the question (more than likely NT) probably didn't consider the vagueness of the question to someone with AS or other ASD. So again, I agree with you that your pollster should have a better grasp of what they're trying to ask.



Amen. I agree. I despise Net-speak and text-speak. Language is hard enough to filter out, anyway, but when compacted into a sentence like, "IMO, u ppl need 2 talk nrml, K?' I end up scratching my head. This is why I avoid live chat rooms. I can't keep up with them.



That's true, too. Rather than saying a boy has a nice pair of basketball shoes, they might say, "You've got some wicked sick kicks, dude." Since I've always been fascinated by language, particularly colloquialisms and street slang, I want to know what's being said, so I have to stop and ask a younger person what a perticular term means. Most times I can divine it by looking at the context [bad=good?], but I'm tripped up by ever-changing slang all the time. I didn't even know what an 'emo' was until I came to this forum, and again, I had to ask.



As much as I agree with you, it's not going to happen unless we all become Pod People, like in the movie 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' and share some sort of Hive Mind. Ifwe could all read each other's thoughts, or at least stated how we really feel, without emotional and physical repercussion, this would be a far better world. There would be no more war, no more lies and no more disguising intent. When I was five years old, I asked an older African American boy what the 'N-word' was (I said the actual word), he replied by punching me right in the face. I didn't understand why he hit me, but I did learn right away that A., only black people were allowed to say it, and B., it was a bad word for white people to say. Later on I learned the 'why' of it.

'there would be no more war' my ass, wars are never caused by people miscommunicating. It's when political and economic interests meet that wars occur. So even in a world where everyone is hypercommunicated wars would still occur if economic and political gains can still be made of the demise of some people.

I hate how persons act with the lying and deceiving but it really is an acceptable consequence of getting humans to live in societies I believe. Somehow it feels like Nts are under a lot of pressure too but just heavily in denial about it, you can basicly go up to anyone today and inquire about his problems. He'll always have a few, at least one to keep him busy it seems.

I hate how I always want to delete my post right before I post them.

My problem isn't so much in reading hidden intentions as it is conversational transparency. I find that I'm expected to “warm up” to people with small talk which I’m terrible at. It always feels inappropriate for me to delve deeply into an intimate discussion with people and I wish this wasn’t so.

Also, people aren’t ever serious enough for me. It’s like they have to wear a social mask, act slick and polished, hide their feelings with sarcasm, jokes, etc. And then I’m supposed to empathize with people’s problems when they’re always like this? Ugh!

Groups of NT’s always seem to act slick like this around each other, yet somehow they all manage to get to know each other and I’m the only one left out of the loop. I think I don’t pick up on stuff because I get exhausted by their antics and simply drift off into my own thoughts.

Hints, second and third hidden meanings, reading faces and body language to guess whether the other person is lying, etc. are part of an "arms race" of communication between people. People are indirect to be tactful and keep things private, so you have to work harder to figure out what's going on. But then they compensate further in response to your compensation, and so on. The miracle is that, despite this, anybody can understand anybody else at all. After many layers of encryption and decoding the actual words may have nothing to do with what's really being said.

Last edited by sgrannel on 28 May 2008, 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People read faces all the time, but not everybody is good at it. The way a person thinks does not always match what is being expressed. A good example there is Tom Landry, the old Dallas Cowboys coach. He maintained a serious look on the sidelines during games and his teams won many of them. How often could he have been upset?

However, people do take facial expressions seriously. A person will make a conclusion to another's thoughts just by the look on the face. It's said that we can't read faces well, but many others are incapable of reading them, too. Assumptions are made from them, which leads to misunderstanding in many areas. People don't have to have AS to fall into this trap.

Communcations arms race interesting analogy. I was thinking "inflation" like with money . Old notes now worth nothing etc.

Once upon a time someone's word was their bond. And even if there were people who cheated etc, it still counted for something serious. For money, work contracts, etc.

Lovely OP. I suppose NTs don't need to hone their language use as much as AS because they rely so much more on body language cues to understand others. Whereas I have trouble doing/handling/processing the two types of signals at the same time.

I tend to prefer to concentrate if at all possible on the words someone is using, although they can be so disappointing/flat/uninteresting in fact. I suppose that is because I'm missing the rest/more than half of their communication.

I think this is an interesting point, though I don't agree with everything. I read an article in Psychology Today not too long ago where it discussed "genuineness" and the search for identity, and I couldn't relate at all because I've never been able to make a "mask" for myself. I've always been very much aware of myself and how I feel, though my ability to know what people think of me is impaired. The best I can do is barely conceal my most immediate emotions. I didn't think this had to do with ASDs, but perhaps it does.

I don't think the problem with social cues is that people are opaque but the difficulty reading what the person is showing at the time. Very few people are able to be honest about themselves to more than their closest friends, so I doubt that's an ASD problem. My problems stem from several different social factors that make it difficult to function well in social settings, such as lack of understanding anything but kindness or dislike from people I haven't befriended, literal translations of certain phrases, etc. These don't really stem from people being disonest about their true feelnigs, however.