[HN Gopher] Object personification in autism: This paper will be...
___________________________________________________________________
Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you
don't read (2018)
Author : oliverkwebb
Score : 88 points
Date : 2025-06-16 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| sea-gold wrote:
| This sounds fascinating. Too bad the paper is not freely
| available.
|
| Side note: Be sure to check out Unpaywall[1][2] which allows you
| to (legally!!!) read research papers for free.
|
| [1]: https://unpaywall.org/products/extension
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31271101
| sim7c00 wrote:
| haha thanks, i was just thinking how cruel for the paper to
| paywall it!!
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Available here:
| https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:edc2de03-af02-4dd4-8851-e5...
| [PDF]
| squigz wrote:
| Published in 2018
|
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/1362361318793408
| j4coh wrote:
| I always thought this was something I got from watching The Brave
| Little Toaster and similar content when I was tiny.
| benatkin wrote:
| Better than Toy Story, but Toy Story is much better known and
| does the same thing
| hildolfr wrote:
| Yeah..except that The Brave Little Toaster has a specific
| anti consumerism slant..
|
| I can't imagine why the toy based story that was designed
| from the get-go to shovel plastic into kids via emotional
| hooks took off better and was better supported by the
| industry...
| anonymars wrote:
| _I can 't take this kind of pressure
|
| I must confess one more dusty road
|
| Would be just a road too long
|
| Worthless_
|
| IYKYK. A few touches:
|
| - "I just can't / I just can't / I just can't seem to get
| started" mimics a car trying to turn over
|
| - Pairing the wedding and the funeral
| qoez wrote:
| I always had the impression it was the other way around, non
| autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I
| always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled
| into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and
| some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally
| I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of
| autistic too.)
| sctb wrote:
| I'm not fooled whatsoever into thinking LLMs are human, but I
| am polite in how I interact with them because the language that
| I use impacts my experience. Same goes with how I interact with
| anything, linguistically or not.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could
| spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high
| reality" sorts. My own classification system:
|
| The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on
| everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of
| mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across
| objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental
| capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living
| in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.
|
| At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any
| kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in
| video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really
| exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.
|
| Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call
| dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the
| world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two
| perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind
| of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very
| adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.
|
| I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type
| which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic
| culture of these varieties in interaction.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the
| type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic
| culture of these varieties in interaction.
|
| What is an example of "high-engagement culture?"
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| Is there anything published on this?
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Echoing the other comments here, you should write down your
| classification system and share it.
|
| Maybe others would benefit from understanding your intuition
| about this.
| _0ffh wrote:
| > I always had the impression it was the other way around, non
| autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects.
|
| The paper says, they do!
|
| The surprising part is that autist do it _too_ , at
| approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.
| energywut wrote:
| Some scientists believe that autistic people have different
| levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this
| manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals,
| or higher emotional empathy.
|
| I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or
| experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch
| of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human
| make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I
| have to teach myself that my _values_ are that we should care
| for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy
| towards.
|
| In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all
| uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely
| strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat
| empathy response in others.
| footy wrote:
| > it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to
| have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some
| cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others
|
| to add another datapoint to this, the only movie that's ever
| made me cry is Wall-E. I felt so sad for him at the beginning
| of it, all alone and trying to complete an impossible,
| unappreciated task.
|
| I'm sure there are objectively sadder movies out there, but
| not for me.
| sdwr wrote:
| The normal version is anthropomorphizing - projecting humanity
| onto something (state of mind, emotions, reactions).
|
| The autistic version is interpreting the state of objects
| emotionally, which is closer to synesthesia.
|
| The normal version is practice for interacting with people, the
| autistic version is consuming emotional attention that could
| otherwise be used for people.
| sctb wrote:
| I don't have access to the full text, but based on the abstract I
| think it's likely that I relate to this phenomenon (I am
| autistic).
|
| My experience is not so much the attribution of human
| characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this
| might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a
| useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness
| through neglect or malice, I experience something like an
| emotional response. A good example would be a dull knife. There's
| something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to
| be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.
|
| Or perhaps a more subtle example would be a room whose contents
| are haphazard or in disarray. In that situation I would sense a
| lack of care or attention and there might be an emotional feeling
| that these objects had not been respected or appreciated.
|
| It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people.
| It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people
| to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human
| you get, the less people seem to care: e.g. insects, plants,
| bacteria, viruses, etc. For me there is something that "scales"
| down all the way to inanimate objects.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Here's where you can find the full paper.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326979070_Object_pe...
|
| It's pretty short and was basically just a survey monkey survey
| of ~100 people (400 total) who report having autism.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain
| objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a
| soul.
|
| It's easy to get sentimental over neglected things because I
| seem to have an innate appreciation and sense of duty toward
| objects that are designed to help people. It only seems fair
| that the contract includes care and maintenance from the user.
|
| I live in an aging neighborhood and weep for some of these
| homes. I visited an abandoned unit just this weekend and went
| through the spectrum of sadness and anger that such a beautiful
| building had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. The unit
| was unsafe to live in, the foundation is cracking in two, one
| wall has a crack so large that you can see the outside and in
| several places, the floor is close to caving in. But the
| outside of the building is so nice. :(
|
| We just bought a house in the neighborhood that is in mostly
| good shape considering its owners were older and lived there
| for over 20 years. I look forward to shaping her up, replacing
| the roof, refinishing the floors, repairing the foundation,
| fixing some water damage, etc. She's a great little home and it
| pains me to see her not at her best.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukumogami
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where
| certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued
| with a soul.
|
| I feel like cars tend to do it much, much sooner, given how
| short their life is. :-)
|
| My personal and private belief is that once I have owned an
| item for a while, I give it a portion of _my own_ soul. The
| "personality" doesn't have to match mine, or have any
| desirable traits, but it is there, it is because I am, and
| I'm shaping the thing by my own usage patterns.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Yes, Tsukumogami is I believe an instance of animism [1].
|
| AFAIK I am not affected by autism, but I distinctly remember
| when as a child I refused to eat something because that thing
| didn't "want" to be eaten. I guess that from my parent's
| perspective, it was just their child's whim-of-the-day.
|
| But that memory makes me think that animism is something
| natural - perhaps some sort "bug" in the system that make us
| attribute intentions [2] to others.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism [2] https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals#Attr...
| tetromino_ wrote:
| > A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad"
| about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to
| lose or lack that sharpness.
|
| Interesting - I think you've just explained "Tear-Water Tea"
| [1] (Arnold Lobel's classic childrens story) for me.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/Tear-waterTea-English-
| ArnoldLobe...
| LoganDark wrote:
| I agree, it's more like empathy for objects directly rather
| than assigning human anything to objects. For instance, I don't
| perceive objects as human, honestly if I can help it I don't
| even perceive humans as human. I have empathy for concepts that
| have nothing to do with humanity or with assigning things
| humanity or human characteristics. Nothing I do or feel is
| human-centric. I don't even identify human myself (I am
| otherkin)
| jacinabox wrote:
| Oh dang, so the _others_ do walk among us?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I relate to this easily. My family finds it so strange that I
| can look at a flat tire and say something like "aw, poor
| thing". And I'm half-joking, yet... Well, it gives me an
| emotional response. I think a lot of people can relate to that
| example in particular because there is a sort of 'deflated'
| sense of self most people can experience, but not so much with
| the dull knife or a rock being split in half.
|
| Something I found which coincides somewhat well with what
| you're saying: it seems like a disproportionate number of
| vegans are not neurotypical. I'm mostly plant-based because I
| can't separate animals from humans enough. It feels wrong to
| eat them. Not that I lower humans to animal level, though. I
| raise animals, or the hierarchy is flatter. I also find insects
| so much more amazing--and neurologically salient I suppose--
| than virtually everyone I know. Yet in the isopod collecting
| hobby, you'll find plenty of people who love insects and
| arachnids and so on, and they seem to lean towards
| neurodivergence as well.
| metalman wrote:
| my recent experience as an adept tool user/maker and repairer
| of all things mundane is that my emotional response is
| sufficient and planing or thinking about what I am doing
| isn't realy ressesary...unless it's something potentialy
| dangerous or deadly I am doing, and then I mainly stay out of
| gravitys way and/or any line of potential failure involving a
| lot of mass and torque living in a rural maritime area, many
| objects are personified and gendered, mostly female here,but
| the pennsylvania side of the family says "he's a good truck!"
| which is completely different from outport fisherfolk who
| refer to anything manufactured as a machine, "bring me that
| blue machine der you" refering to a plastic bucket, which was
| a common attitude in pre industrial societies that were
| rubbing up against the manufactured world, where everything
| in there world was personified by the person (who they know)
| who made it echos of this, everywhere diagnosible now....
| michaelg7x wrote:
| I don't find this surprising at all. Humans are tool-users, and
| valuing an object's utility and experiencing a feeling of
| something like loss when it's neglected or loses efficacy would
| seem to be an advantageous trait.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| For me, even software running on devices can make the device
| "content" or "unhappy". It's like the software is in line with
| how the silicon wants to be. Its not design, it's something
| deeper. Like a kind of flow state for bits.
|
| One large scale example could be linux vs windows on a server.
| Linux seems to be more attuned to how the system wants to run.
| With reflection this might be me combining anthropomorphising
| and my own prejudices and likes and biases with a projection of
| my personality onto the software.
|
| But I remember certain Windows applications felt they run
| better than others - even ones with worse design or that were
| proprietary. With more consideration this might be when
| computers had visual blinking LEDs and audible HD clicks and
| subliminal capacitor whine. If that's the case then in my
| feeling, software that made conservative use of CPU and HD
| beyond looking nice might be "happier" than more popular
| applications.
|
| Writing the above I'm reminded of Terry Davis's TempleOS but
| I'm not sure what to make of _that_ feeling!
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other
| people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common,
| for people to care about animals. The further away from
| recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care
|
| I think this also explains a lot about how _normal_ people
| behave. They not only care mostly about humans but mostly about
| _their tribe_. The operation of some system which is designed
| to protect everyone is only important when it 's protecting
| their own people and can be disregarded when that isn't the
| case. Whereas people whose empathy extends past their own walls
| can feel a harm to the whole society when that happens.
|
| Even now I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking
| "yes, the other tribe does that all the time! They're such
| hypocrites!" But that's the easy one. The hard thing is to
| recognize it and stop it when _you 're_ doing it.
| thayne wrote:
| I relate to that. I wouldn't say I attribute human
| characteristics to non-human objects, but I definitely feel
| emotional distress when I see objects destroyed harmed, throw
| away, etc.
|
| For me, I think a big part of it is a sense of waste or lost
| potential. If the object hadn't been broken, it could have had
| longer useful life, and it upsets me that that was cut short.
| tudorw wrote:
| Are you familiar with Shinto, you might enjoy the perspective.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I remember in the 1990's when I felt very strongly that in
| chess, rook pawns could be advanced far more often than they
| were in Grandmaster games. And in recent years modern computers
| confirm that (it has been called "the rook pawn revolution").
| Looking back on it a bit later, I realized I had no logical,
| left-brain systems support for it, only one of the strongest
| "systems" feelings I can remember ever having. I also grew up
| on the spectrum, with a side of moderately severe anxiety
| disorder, and extreme difficulty sleeping.
| moffkalast wrote:
| This doesn't sound exclusive to autistic people to me at all,
| more like normal human behaviour. Though I would imagine the
| average person is more likely to get angry about the dull knife
| for wasting their time.
| layer8 wrote:
| Object personification is if you would feel that the knife
| itself is sad, is hurting, etc., and you'd feel for it. If, on
| the other hand, you're just sad yourself that the knife is
| dull, because that's not how a knife is supposed to be, then
| that's not personifying the knife, it's more an aesthetic
| judgement about a state of affairs. Similarly for the room
| example. You feel emotional about the state of affairs that
| other people haven't respected it, but you don't think the room
| itself is emotional about it.
|
| Another example is if one is sad that a favorite software or
| service has become enshittified. One doesn't attribute emotion
| to the software or service itself, rather one feels emotional
| about the state the software or service is in.
|
| Those are completely neurotypical emotional reactions.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I'll stop personifying objects when they stop having
| personalities!
|
| The abstract seems to suggest that object personification is
| common with people who don't have autism too, _perhaps_ less
| common than with people that have autism. This more or less
| tracks with my intuition that object personification is normal.
| People do it all the time with ships, cars, guns, computers, or
| whatever other machines they work with, whatever is important to
| them and complex enough to have a personality of its own.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| There's definitely some bias around personification. Several
| religions and cultures place importance on personification
| and/or anthropomorphism.
|
| Perhaps like auditory hallucinations, the experience can be
| distressing _or not_ and we can observe that between different
| cultures.
|
| I appreciate that the abstract highlighted where
| personification is unhelpful.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Yes, I found that part interesting. It never occurred to me
| that some people might find object personification to be
| distressing.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Same here, feels like a pretty normal trait, both my kids have
| this with their favorite toys (I had the same as well) and
| nowadays I do have attachment to some of my stuff, specially my
| kitchen utensils/devices, my kitchen aid mixer (10 years old
| now) even has a name.
|
| From the summary it feels like the problem is more related to
| the fact they have more distressing events, I don't think i've
| had any recently but i can think of one or two when i was a kid
| and lot favorite toys.
| echohack5 wrote:
| <Date Everything! has entered the chat>
| gryfft wrote:
| Oh jeez, can't Date Everything! at least buy the chat dinner
| first?!
| zzzeek wrote:
| I had this to a significant degree as a child, back in the world
| where "autism" only meant "profoundly non verbal" and such a
| diagnosis had nothing to do with me (and yes it could be
| distressing. Even to this day I sometimes feel sad about deleting
| text in documents and replacing it with similar text,
| experiencing the desperation of a perfectly fine word about to no
| longer exist. I told a therapist about this like ten years ago
| and she looked me blankly. I guess I still have this). I wrote a
| whole essay called "The Floor's Opinion" in grade school and I
| was hailed as a creative genius.
|
| In that recent story in the NYT about dating agencies for people
| on the spectrum, so many of the comments (in the NYT, not here)
| were very angry at how the definition of autism has been so
| greatly expanded in recent decades to include people who are high
| functioning. The commenters felt it took away from their own
| children's diagnoses, not just in name but also in terms of
| competition for resources, and didnt see what the point was for
| people who were low on the spectrum.
|
| But I will say when they identify specific traits that I've
| always wondered about and even told clueless therapists about, it
| feels way better to know a little bit of the reasoning for why
| you have some freakish habit.
| shayway wrote:
| This is neither here nor there, but it's interesting that the
| only personification made more often by non-autistic people is
| gender. Demographics may explain this but I wonder if there are
| more broad differences in how autistic people view identity.
| earnestinger wrote:
| Lot of languages assign gender to objects.
|
| One should control for foreign language knowledge.
| seabird wrote:
| A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are
| (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object.
| "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.
| energywut wrote:
| It's not the worst name for the concept when you include "a
| male" and "a female" as prominent nouns in that noun class.
| If you adjust your language depending on whether you are
| addressing a man or a woman (or speaking about a man or
| woman), then it's definitely _also_ social gender (as well
| as grammatical gender), even if those two concepts are
| separate.
| seabird wrote:
| Except there's no mandate that "a male" and "a female"
| are of different noun classes, nor are the nouns for
| man/woman abnormally privileged in most cases. I know
| Dutch has fused masculine/feminine nouns into a "common"
| gender, leaving the language with effectively only the
| common and neuter genders. If I remember correctly, a
| similar thing has happened in Swedish and Danish. Some
| languages have various concepts of animacy driving the
| system. Some languages have shitloads of noun classes.
|
| You can adjust your language depending on the biological
| gender of who you're addressing in English, but English
| doesn't have grammatical gender in any meaningful way.
| The concepts are largely orthogonal.
|
| Calling it gender really is just a bad, misleading name
| in the grand scheme of things.
| earnestinger wrote:
| Except for all the languages that actually call the
| grammatical concept: gender
|
| Edit: see German example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Grammatical_gender_in_German
| drewcoo wrote:
| Grammatical use came first by far.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| "Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its
| modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the
| 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from
| biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to
| just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't
| think it's a bad name for the concept.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| French and Spanish literally use a contraction of the Latin
| for he and she for different objects though. This is also
| done in Swedish.
|
| Hon slar tolv. 'She strikes twelve', referring to the clock
| currently striking.
| nailer wrote:
| Please don't anthropomorphise research papers - they hate it.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| I don't experience that at all, but definitely do associatively
| recall all the nontrivial uses / interactions I've had with
| items. It makes organizing stuff a mentally exhausting activity
| unless I'm in the right head space.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _We carried out an online survey, administered via Survey
| Monkey_
|
| This type of thing, where they do some statistics on survey data,
| seems to be fairly typical in psychology research. But I find it
| hard to believe that you can actually get good data from self-
| reporting in surveys.
|
| There must be selection effects: " _The survey was advertised on
| social media and through the researchers' own networks_ ".
|
| And the questions may not be interpreted by the respondents as
| imagined. What does it mean if you select "None of the above" in
| their core question? That you think that objects have no
| attributes whatsoever? " _Do you ever view objects as having:
| Gender / Human-like attributes / Feelings / Other / None of the
| above_"
|
| See also "replication crisis". Psychology is at the center of it.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe that you can get actually get good
| data from self-reporting in surveys.
|
| Especially when you consider the Lizardman's Constant of 4%
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
|
| This article was written in 2013. The Internet has become a
| significantly more toxic place since then, and I would imagine
| the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > [...] I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20%
| these days.
|
| On what basis?
| vntok wrote:
| An online survey administered via Survey Monkey, of course.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| On basis of spending a lot of my teenage time browsing
| 4chan, I'd say it's not 15%, but closer to 69% or even
| whole 420%. You just loose faith in humanity from spending
| too much time on the internet.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| So we're writing off the methodologies of the entire
| field of psychology on the basis of numbers pulled out of
| your--on the basis of your gut feeling?
| kbelder wrote:
| In fairness, Wafflemaker's gut feeling probably has a
| better track record.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| [delayed]
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Don't you know this is HN? A hand wave here is worth more
| than any methodical research.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Based on what I learned from this video:
| https://youtu.be/r7l0Rq9E8MY?t=2
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Forget the quality of the data, you can give the same data to
| different researchers and get wildly different conclusions. [1,
| from 2, from 3]
|
| (Disclaimer: not my area of expertise.)
|
| [1] N. Breznau et al., "Observing many researchers using the
| same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of
| uncertainty," PNAS, October 2022, URL:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119
|
| [2] B. Klaas, "The Crisis of Zombie Social Science." The Garden
| of Forking Paths. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-crisis-of-
| zombie-social-sc...
|
| [3] The crisis of zombie social science (20 points, 2 days ago)
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44272057
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup. There's so much pressure to publish something that we
| consistently see attempts to extract data from noise.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This is a good example of research that is too preliminary for
| anyone to form any conclusions about.
|
| It was 400 people, 100 of whom report having autism. And it was
| conducted by posting links to the survey monkey survey on social
| media.
|
| It might have some interesting follow up studies, but I find no
| reason to really take this for much other than an indicator that
| further study should be done.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Take this with a grain of salt because I am not autistic but my
| first intuition when reading the paper wasn't that autistic
| people antropomorphize objects, but maybe its the other way
| around. Namely that they have less of a subjective or interior
| view on people, how other people see them and maybe how they see
| themselves (there's some comments to that effect in this thread)
|
| Again because I don't have direct experience with it I don't want
| to lean too much into stereotypes, but it seems possible to me
| that people with autism have a more monistic, or at least less
| dualistic view on these things because the kind of thing that
| makes other people distinguish between subjects and objects is
| less present in people with autism.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I'm glad to see more research into this phenomena. Not the _best_
| data out there, sure, but it's a _start_ that could incentivize
| further research with proper sample sizes and procedures.
|
| This is an issue I'm acutely familiar with. Everything of import
| is, to a degree, personified. Not everything gets a _name_ ,
| necessarily, but everything has an "identity" which helps me to
| process events and interactions with it.
|
| AVR crashes? "Oh, she's being pissy today."
|
| Car taking a little longer to start in the morning? "I know girl,
| I'm tired too."
|
| This extends to treatment: the more personified the object, the
| better its treatment. Stuffed animals get names and apologies, as
| does Siri (though the voice assistants also get a tongue lashing
| when they're non-performant). When I retire something, I try to
| find it a good home before trashing it (which is why an old
| Pioneer HDMI 2.0 AVR is still sitting in a box, alone and unloved
| by a new owner). I treat objects with the same reverence I treat
| people, which earns me the occasional eyeroll.
|
| I'd love to know more about why this phenomena is so prevalent in
| autistic people, and what the benefits or harms of it are. Here's
| hoping another team takes up this baton and runs with it some
| more.
| Vaslo wrote:
| My small daughter is mildly autistic. Very friendly but overly
| obsessed with the life of bugs and very concerned about human
| like tendencies in bugs. She personifies other objects but it
| seems hard to tell if that's just a child thing or one of her
| symptoms.
|
| Even with the bugs I'm always wondering if that's a kid thing
| too, but the fact the other kids her age couldn't care less about
| bugs makes me wonder if it's autism related.
| energywut wrote:
| It's both. Child neurological development goes through a lot of
| mirroring the environments they observe in play, and mapping
| them onto stuffed animals, dolls, bugs, pets, toys, etc.
| There's an age where kids are developing interiority (children
| do not have an "inner voice" and do not develop it until 5-7,
| typically) and during that time, a lot of their play is them
| learning the rules and developing empathy (children do not have
| a concept of being able to put themselves in others shoes until
| age 3-7, typically).
|
| Autistic children are often times _very_ interested in learning
| rules and applying them in other settings. Autistic young
| women, especially, are navigating a complicated social
| environment that _strongly_ encourages them to understand the
| rules of what it means to be a woman in society. Learning those
| rules and then saying, "Ok little (bugs|stuffed animals|toys),
| here's how things work" is both a thing kids do and a thing
| autistic kids do.
|
| Couple that with special interests (dinosaurs, trains, bugs,
| bones, whatever), and you'll often see autistic kids getting
| WAY into one particular thing and then mapping the world they
| experience onto that thing.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| "Normal people" do it, too - ask a sailor about ship. Some people
| name and gender their vehicles. To a certain extent, it comes
| from close association with object.
|
| I'm the guy who drives around with a cartoon drawing of a robot
| in his car that will utterly destroy anyone who tries to steal
| it, so I ought to know.
| hildolfr wrote:
| Sailors, at least the ones I know, are often superstitious
| because 1) marine tradition is filled with legends and beliefs
| 2) the sea is cruel and unforgiving.
|
| No one wants to be sinking while remembering that they forgot
| to christen the boat , they just killed a seabird, and they
| stepped onto the boat with their left foot.
|
| My point: I see marine superstition as a cultural affect rather
| than a sign of any such other psychology.
| kgwgk wrote:
| the sea is [a] cruel and unforgiving [mistress]
| doright wrote:
| Inanimate objects won't berate you in response to ascribing a
| state of being to them against their will.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Reminds me of a theme in the cult classic _Shooting Fish_ where
| the more technical-minded con artist was accused of repairing old
| household appliances out of pity.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| It sounds that the paper indetified that autistic people do this
| at the same ratio everyone else?
|
| """ Together, our results indicate that object personification
| occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more
| often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| So proof that the OOO crowd is autistic!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
| dfsegoat wrote:
| I also relate - but have not received a formal diagnosis other
| than ADD.
|
| - I remember feeling sorry for cars in a car dealership on a hot
| summer day as a child: "they must be miserable in this heat!"
|
| - I frequently to this day personify my childrens stuffed animals
| & dolls & action figures: "They must feel so lonely not being
| played with anymore!"
|
| - I was inordinately attached to my own stuffed animals / toys as
| a kid. I remember when one got taken away during a schoolday,
| that I felt like someone had kidnapped a family member - and I
| was inconsolable.
|
| It's fantastic to see that this is now being investigated in the
| literature.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I feel a very deep, apparently irrational reluctance to throw
| away objects I no longer need, especially if those objects are
| well-crafted. I feel that doing so is disrespectful of the love
| and effort the object's creator invested in them.
| neilv wrote:
| Something I've wondered that's maybe related: How many people
| "feel" systems?
|
| Like, if you're designing, building, or managing a large and
| complex system, and there are concerns in different aspects of
| it, and you have maybe a kind of emotional coprocessor about it,
| e.g., keeping track of all the parts that bother you, and how
| much they bother you? (Also, parts that you like.)
|
| I'm pretty sure that not all people have nearly the same capacity
| for this, but I don't know the distribution.
| leksak wrote:
| Decidedly relatable to me to the point where I have a custom
| field on our ClickUps called " Pain " at my work
| gwbas1c wrote:
| About half of my time spent coding is making the code "feel
| good."
|
| It's really important, too. That's how the code becomes
| maintainable for the next person.
| 1dom wrote:
| I relate to this quite a lot, and I've met a few different
| people over my career that I feel have the same gut intuition
| or instinct for systems.
|
| You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field,
| often within a few sentences. It's really eye opening moving
| between areas of high and low densities people like this.
|
| I did used to think it was normal and common but I've
| definitely come to doubt that as I've got older. I think it's
| been a hindrance at times though, particularly in some business
| environments that aren't producing systems that feel nice.
| Although there's a certain satisfaction and special sense of
| achievement in making an unhappy feeling system do amazing
| things.
| neilv wrote:
| > _You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field,
| often within a few sentences._
|
| Exactly. But don't let the interview people know that, or it
| will become another ritual that everyone checkboxes and
| fakes. :)
| derivagral wrote:
| > "feel" systems
|
| I used to play a tcg a bit too seriously, and sometimes seeing
| incorrect game states would trigger something. Part of tracking
| game states and derivations I guess. Only sometimes helpful in
| software.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| You see this used even as diagnostic criteria yet when people
| attribute malice to their computer or car its considered normal.
| To me this is just normal anthropomorphization and the confusion
| regarding emotions in autism. I honestly am convinced there is
| nothing but communication going wrong here
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