Mental Blindness

"Mental blindness," or "mind-blindness," describes difficulty with or inability to attribute mental states onto others. All babies are born this way. Over time, they learn that other people are human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.
== What It Means ==
People with "mind-blindness" do not know how to understand people's feelings or predict their behavior.https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82375639.pdf They don't know how to decode clues like facial expressions, tone of voice, or body language.
This makes building friendships and other relationships challenging.https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/aspergers-diary/200805/empathy-mindblindness-and-theory-mind
== Mental blindness in different populations ==
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen coined the term "mental blindness" (or "mind-blindness") to describe his observations of autistic people in the 20th century. He believed that autistic people struggled to be able to attribute mental states onto othershttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11754830/, resulting in a deficit of empathic and social skills. Many children he perceived as "mind-blind" were subsequently diagnosed as autistic.https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Mindblindness%3A-Autism%2C-Writing%2C-and-the-Problem-of-Jurecic/763accef62f9c30c25e91baad9a5eaf306c5955c Mental blindness is frequently associated with Theory of Mind, which explores the capacity of individuals to understand that others have different opinions and experiences than themselves.A.M. Leslie,
Theory of Mind,
Editor(s): Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Baltes,
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,
Pergamon,
2001,
Pages 15652-15656,
ISBN 9780080430768,
https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/01640-5.
Baron-Cohen's work on mental blindness paved the way for the discovery of an interesting phenomenon. People with schizophrenia are impaired in theory of mind and also exhibit mental blindness.Pijnenborg, G.H., Spikman, J., Jeronimus, B.F., & Aleman, A. (2012). Insight in schizophrenia: associations with empathy. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 263, 299-307. This discovery has helped to create an important dialogue around schizophrenia and how it impairs cognitive functions.
=== Misconceptions around autism ===
While Sir Simon Baron-Cohen first believed mental blindness to be a trait of autism, subsequent research has shown that many autistic people do not have an impaired theory of mind.(1991) Executive Function Deficits in High-Functioning Autistic Individuals: Relationship to Theory of Mind. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 32 (7): 1081–1105.(1989) Role taking and social competence in autism and [intellectual disability]. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 19 (1): 119–127.(1994) A second look at second-order belief attribution in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24 (5): 577–586.(2019) Empirical Failures of the Claim That Autistic People Lack a Theory of Mind. Archives of Scientific Psychology 7 (1): 102–118. Baron-Cohen's newer research shows that around half of autistic people have average or above-average performance on empathy and theory of mind measures.(2021-10-03) Social cognition in adults with autism spectrum disorders: Validation of the Edinburgh Social Cognition Test (ESCoT). The Clinical Neuropsychologist 35 (7): 1275–1293.(2018-11-27) Testing the Empathizing–Systemizing theory of sex differences and the Extreme Male Brain theory of autism in half a million people. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (48): 12152–12157.(2016-10-18) Unsupervised data-driven stratification of mentalizing heterogeneity in autism. Scientific Reports 6 (1): 35333.
Instead, autistic people find it easier to understand autistic people and harder to understand non-autistic people. Non-autistic people find it harder to understand autistic people.Milton, Damian E. M. (October 2012). On the ontological status of autism: the 'double empathy problem'. Disability & Society 27 (6): 883–887.Milton, Damian. The double empathy problem.(October 2022) The 'double empathy problem': Ten years on. Autism 26 (8): 1901–1903. Non-autistic people can be "mind-blind" when it comes to autistic people, greatly misjudging them.Heasman B, Gillespie A. Perspective-taking is two-sided: Misunderstandings between people with Asperger's syndrome and their family members. Autism. 2018 Aug;22(6):740-750. doi: 10.1177/1362361317708287. Epub 2017 Jul 7. PMID: 28683569; PMCID: PMC6055325.Lim, A., Young, R.L. & Brewer, N. Autistic Adults May Be Erroneously Perceived as Deceptive and Lacking Credibility. J Autism Dev Disord 52, 490–507 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04963-4 (Education on autism can help with this problem.Scheerer NE, Boucher TQ, Sasson NJ, Iarocci G. Effects of an Educational Presentation About Autism on High School Students' Perceptions of Autistic Adults. Autism Adulthood. 2022 Sep 1;4(3):203-213. doi: 10.1089/aut.2021.0046. Epub 2022 Aug 31. PMID: 36606156; PMCID: PMC9645669.Sasson, N. J., & Morrison, K. E. (2019). First impressions of adults with autism improve with diagnostic disclosure and increased autism knowledge of peers. Autism, 23(1), 50-59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361317729526)
This is known as the "double empathy problem." This suggests that autistic people are not socially deficient, but that communication struggles are more akin to a language barrier.Rozsa, Matthew. Being autistic may amount to a language difference — not an impairment. Resolving communication difficulties will need to involve effort from non-autistic people as well as autistic people.
== See also ==
* Theory of Mind
* Theory of mind in autism
* Autism
== References ==
Category:1980s
Category:1990s
Category:Theories