The role of the self in mindblindness in autism

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Abstract

Since its inception the ‘mindblindness’ theory of autism has greatly furthered our understanding of the core social-communication impairments in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, one of the more subtle issues within the theory that needs to be elaborated is the role of the ‘self’. In this article, we expand on mindblindness in ASC by addressing topics related to the self and its central role in the social world and then review recent research in ASC that has yielded important insights by contrasting processes relating to both self and other. We suggest that new discoveries lie ahead in understanding how self and other are interrelated and/or distinct, and how understanding atypical self-referential and social-cognitive mechanisms may lead to novel ideas as to how to facilitate social-communicative abilities in ASC.

Introduction

If history is any metric of importance, then the ‘self’ should be ranked not only among one of the most important topics in psychological inquiry, but also among one of the most important topics in autism research. Inquiry into the self dates back to as early as the ancient Greeks. The aphorism gnōthi seauton (“know thyself”) refers to the idea that to understand human behavior, morals, and thought one must first understand oneself. Similarly, autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are named after the Ancient Greek word autos, which literally translates as ‘self’. The first characterizations of autism by Kanner (1943) and Asperger (1944) introduced notions of ‘extreme egocentrism’ that lead to ‘autistic aloneness’. From the start, these early notions suggested the concept of ‘self’ is fundamentally altered in autism and is integral to the hallmark difficulties in social and communicative domains.

If we fast forward to the mid-1980s, it was discovered that individuals with ASC are profoundly impaired in understanding minds; an normative ability we now refer to as ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mentalizing’ (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). This theory of mind impairment in ASC is not explained simply as a deficit in general meta-representation (e.g., decoupling events from reality) as individuals with ASC pass tests of ‘out of date’ pictorial representations (e.g., false photos) even whilst failing tests about understanding ‘out of date’ beliefs (e.g., false beliefs) (Charman and Baron-Cohen, 1992, Leslie and Thaiss, 1992). Furthermore, the theory of mind impairment in ASC extends into an understanding of one’s own mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1989, Perner et al., 1989) and has been shown to be more impaired in the self-referential than the social domain (Williams & Happe, 2009). Rather than a complete lack of theory of mind, meta-analytic evidence suggests that many (though not all) individuals with ASC do develop a rudimentary explicit mentalizing ability, albeit at a very delayed point in development (Happe, 1995). However, even here, this explicit mentalizing ability developed at later ages may mask the true deficits in understanding and attributing mental states, as studies of automatic or implicit mentalizing find deficits in ASC all the way up to adulthood (Abell et al., 2000, Klin, 2000, Senju et al., 2009, Senju et al., 2010). Thus, the marked impairments specifically in representing mental states was formulated as the ‘mindblindness’ theory of autism and still stands today as one of the primary cognitive explanations behind social-communicative difficulties in ASC (Baron-Cohen, 1995, Frith, 2001, Hamilton, 2009).

One of the main premises behind the mindblindness theory is the idea that while the general population possesses an intact mechanism for representing or attributing mental states to both self and other, this mechanism (Carruthers, 2009) or set of mechanisms (Baron-Cohen, 1995, Leslie, 1994) is profoundly impaired in ASC. Of particular note is that the proposed mechanisms for mindblindness in ASC have been very ‘other’-centric in nature (Baron-Cohen, 1995, Leslie, 1994), focusing on how individuals read social cues from others (e.g., facial expressions, eye gaze, body postures), or have been agnostic with respect to the target of mentalizing (Baron-Cohen, 1995, Carruthers, 2009) (e.g., intentionality detection, mental state representation). While informative in their own right, ‘other’-centric or ‘target-agnostic’ mechanisms have left a gap in terms of mechanisms that may be responsible for atypical self-referential processes in ASC and their integration into the bigger picture of how individuals navigate and interact with the social world.

Thus, rather than adopting the a priori stance that the mechanisms for mindreading are ‘other-centric’ or ‘target-agnostic’, we pose the question of whether there is anything to be gained by exploring similarities and differences in self-referential vs. other-referential processes in ASC. Approximately 15 years ago when the ‘mindblindness’ account was expanded to a consideration of underlying mechanisms, we alluded to the idea that there is much to be gained by taking into account mechanisms for both understanding our own and other minds (see p. 130 in Baron-Cohen (1995)). Along with work by many others, the self has begun to garner more attention in accounts of mindblindness in ASC (Carruthers, 2009, Frith, 2003, Frith and de Vignemont, 2005, Frith and Happe, 1999, Goldman, 2006, Happe, 2003, Hobson, 1990, Hobson et al., 2006, Hobson and Meyer, 2005, Hurlburt et al., 1994, Nichols and Stich, 2003, Williams, 2010).

With the growing momentum of research on the self in social cognition (not just in autism) over the past 2–3 decades, we take this opportunity to update the mindblindness account by examining some additional factors that take into account the importance of self-referential processing. In this article we begin by highlighting ideas from social psychology. These include ideas such as the relationship between self and other, egocentrism, simulation, asymmetry of informational sources about self and other, perceived similarity, and distinguishing self from other – just a few ways in which knowledge about the self in social cognition can start to provide new insights into the topic of mindblindness and social difficulties in ASC. Our hope is to steer future work in the direction of taking a more balanced approach, looking at how both atypical self-referential and social-cognitive mechanisms contribute to the social difficulties in ASC.

Section snippets

Relational multidimensional selves

People do not exist in a vacuum. We are ‘selves’ embedded in a rich social world full of other ‘selves’. As social psychological and personality research demonstrates, ‘selves’ are not unidimensional; we are multidimensional constructs (Goldberg, 1990, Greenwald and Pratkanis, 1984). Our self-concept is represented as an array of traits in multidimensional space and this multidimensionality allows us to share some variance with others, yet at the same time still be unique – a property which we

Asymmetry in informational sources about self and other

Beyond this idea that the relations we have with the social world considerably affects our perception of it, there are also fundamental considerations regarding differences in the kind of information we use to make inferences about self and other. The information we use for ourselves is largely introspective and interoceptive while the information available for making sense of others is largely extrospective and exteroceptive. That is, we have direct and privileged access to every sensation,

Egocentrism

We also need to pay more attention to the idea of egocentrism in ASC. While autism may seem like ‘egocentrism in the extreme’ (Asperger, 1944, Frith and de Vignemont, 2005), we must keep in mind that some degree of egocentrism itself is in fact the norm within the typical population. Social psychological research has repeatedly demonstrated the egocentric ways in which we make sense of and interpret the world (Greenwald, 1980, Krueger, 2003, Nickerson, 1999). Nowhere is egocentrism more obvious

Simulation: the upshot of egocentrism and privileged access

Although we possess privileged, yet asymmetrical informational access to embodied information and are highly prone to egocentric biases, there are clear benefits for having both. Both enable us to readily use ourselves as proxies for predicting the social world. Since we have ready and direct access to our own experiences and mental life, we exploit this information to our advantage when given an impoverished environment with a lack of direct access to what others think and feel. Philosophers

Simulation as anchoring and adjustment

As the multiple varieties of simulation out there might suggest, the basic idea of using oneself as a proxy for understanding others has not been very consistent in how it is specified. Thus, an idea that may be useful here is to frame the process of simulation as both automatic, and yet effortful and controlled. An integral idea here is the general process in the judgment and decision making literature that Tversky and Kahneman dubbed the ‘anchoring and adjustment’ heuristic (Tversky &

Perceived similarity and distinguishing between self and other

The final notion we will underscore as important for considering the role of the self in mindblindness in ASC is the idea of whether others are perceived as similar to or different from self. Perceived similarity between self and other is one of the primary factors in determining how much adjustment away from self-referential anchors will be required in order to successfully simulate the experience of others. While one may want to anchor on self for others who are similar to oneself, they will

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