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.
soulofmischief 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
> 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.
tetromino_ 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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 2 hours ago [-]
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....
thayne 4 hours ago [-]
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.
QuantumGood 3 hours ago [-]
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.
michaelg7x 5 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thinkingemote 5 hours ago [-]
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!
It's pretty short and was basically just a survey monkey survey of ~100 people (400 total) who report having autism.
moffkalast 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tudorw 4 hours ago [-]
Are you familiar with Shinto, you might enjoy the perspective.
4 hours ago [-]
LoganDark 7 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
Oh dang, so the others do walk among us?
neilv 4 hours ago [-]
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.
1dom 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 1 hours ago [-]
> "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.
gwbas1c 3 hours ago [-]
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.
leksak 3 hours ago [-]
Decidedly relatable to me to the point where I have a custom field on our ClickUps called ” Pain ” at my work
ThinkBeat 5 hours ago [-]
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.
"""
kalium-xyz 1 hours ago [-]
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
qoez 8 hours ago [-]
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.)
mjburgess 7 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?"
adamgordonbell 1 hours ago [-]
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.
kreyenborgi 3 hours ago [-]
Is there anything published on this?
_0ffh 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sdwr 1 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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.
energywut 6 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cogman10 7 hours ago [-]
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.
j4coh 8 hours ago [-]
I always thought this was something I got from watching The Brave Little Toaster and similar content when I was tiny.
anonymars 4 hours ago [-]
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
benatkin 7 hours ago [-]
Better than Toy Story, but Toy Story is much better known and does the same thing
hildolfr 6 hours ago [-]
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...
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 7 hours ago [-]
Lot of languages assign gender to objects.
One should control for foreign language knowledge.
seabird 6 hours ago [-]
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.
a_cardboard_box 4 hours ago [-]
"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 2 hours ago [-]
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 slår tolv. 'She strikes twelve', referring to the clock currently striking.
energywut 6 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
Except for all the languages that actually call the grammatical concept: gender
Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.
To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?
drewcoo 5 hours ago [-]
Grammatical use came first by far.
dfsegoat 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
burnt-resistor 6 hours ago [-]
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.
carterschonwald 7 hours ago [-]
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.
doright 6 hours ago [-]
Inanimate objects won't berate you in response to ascribing a state of being to them against their will.
lupusreal 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mlinhares 7 hours ago [-]
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.
bevr1337 7 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, I found that part interesting. It never occurred to me that some people might find object personification to be distressing.
7 hours ago [-]
sea-gold 8 hours ago [-]
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.
haha thanks, i was just thinking how cruel for the paper to paywall it!!
stego-tech 7 hours ago [-]
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.
nailer 7 hours ago [-]
Please don’t anthropomorphise research papers - they hate it.
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.
zzzeek 7 hours ago [-]
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.
drivingmenuts 7 hours ago [-]
"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 6 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
the sea is [a] cruel and unforgiving [mistress]
Vaslo 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Oh jeez, can't Date Everything! at least buy the chat dinner first?!
wcoenen 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Tijdreiziger 7 hours ago [-]
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
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 7 hours ago [-]
> […] I would imagine the constant is closer to 15-20% these days.
On what basis?
wafflemaker 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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 51 minutes ago [-]
In fairness, Wafflemaker's gut feeling probably has a better track record.
Tijdreiziger 6 hours ago [-]
I doubt 4chan is representative for the entire Internet.
AlecSchueler 6 hours ago [-]
Don't you know this is HN? A hand wave here is worth more than any methodical research.
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.
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
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals#Attr...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. But don't let the interview people know that, or it will become another ritual that everyone checkboxes and fakes. :)
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.
It's really important, too. That's how the code becomes maintainable for the next person.
""" 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. """
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.
What is an example of "high-engagement culture?"
Maybe others would benefit from understanding your intuition about this.
The paper says, they do!
The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
One should control for foreign language knowledge.
Hon slår tolv. 'She strikes twelve', referring to the clock currently striking.
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.
Edit: see German example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_German
To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/1362361318793408
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.
(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
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.
On what basis?