This study mentions but provides no data or analysis for how their study is impacted by or was affected by the differences between nuerotypical and autistic samples. Which is a shame because as an autistic person who doesn’t like eye contact, I think those findings would have been much more insightful and potentially groundbreaking. My hope is the authors have plans to look closer at that.
"2 plus 2 equals 4"
"... in base 10, with arabic numerals."
or... it's already the default baseline that everything ever written about any chaotic system from humans to frogs to cells to the weather, is already understood to only ever be expressable in any other terms than percentages, averages, generalizations. All facts or observations are already only some percentage. especially for humans, especially for behavior, especially for behavior in humans. It's frankly ridiculous to mention, like any other truism.
You could add a ridiculous qualifier on practically every other word in any statement on any subject, and that doesn't make them go from false to true, it makes them go from useful to useless.
In case there was any doubt on that last point, consider that each of those lower lifespan by about 30 years, have ~15X higher suicide rates, and are 1:2 are not able to work full time.
Insults are in the eye of the beholder. For a person with a disorder marked by issues with eye contact and understanding social nuances, imagining insults that aren’t there IS the disability’s effect.
If you comment on how much a black person enjoys watermelon and you do so objectively without malice, it’s still fair for that to be considered a big insult. Why? Because it has been used as a derogatory stereotype for many years.
If you want to understand the perspective of neurodivergents, look up the terms “allistic” and “ableism”.
If someone does not like eye contact, that is still an example of attention.
Stirring up a bad situation is not blameless behavior. It's the favorite realm of children, narcissists and saboteurs.
There are way, way more people who are alike in this way than are blind or deaf. Because it's not visible it's a 'safe' form of discrimination.
Or stated another way if you would feel squeamish about playing Russian Roulette then you’re making the same bet if you make judgments about someone you’re not sure is neurodivergent.
If we play this game at the margins every human in the US is female and there’s some exceptions.
Things there’s fewer of than neurodivergent people.
- people who are left handed
- the number of black americans
- people with blue eyes
- redheads
- people who live in California
A neurodivergant having a hard time processing something, or not liking it, is never the less devoting attention to it.
And surely there are some percentage who actually are oblivious to it rather than merely handling it poorly. But they are not 1 in 6.
But swiss cheese arguments to support percieving things as attacks are both quite typical indeed.
Perhaps interesting is that I do have a mild form of Tourette's syndrome. Eye contact for me very quickly becomes "itchy" and there is a lot of focus required to ignore that feeling for a lengthy conversation.
That said I've personally almost never made eye contact in 42 years of life, but I do look at mouths which nobody has ever noticed isn't eye contact, and I'm sure serves the same purpose. If all you ever do is look away, it would be interesting to hear if you think there are other things that might serve the same "signal shared attention" functionality for you.
I'll also note that autism isn't the only way to be atypical, and sure wouldn't be surprised if eye contact signals shared attention just as much in ADHD folks as in neurotypical folks (but would be very interested in finding out if that's true or not).
This study asserts that eye contact is required for good social engagement and communication. What I am challenging is that that finding is probably only true in Nuerotypical samples and is probably not present in autistic people.
As a neurotypical person, this is actually pretty interesting to me as well. I live in the US and here we are always taught to make eye contact when speaking to someone, as it shows as sign that you are "engaged" with that person. It's something so ingrained in you from a young age here that you start to think that this is how all humans should communicate.
Neurodivergent people just tend to ignore those social constructs, makes me wonder if we as neurotypical people play all these social games and a neurodivergent person just looks at all that as window dressing that isn't required.
This seems like a hypothesis that we could test. For instance, by rationally explaining the practical utility of eye contact, to detect earnestness or deception. Then ask them to attempt this, and see if they can bring themselves to even try. My guess is most neurodivergents who avoid eye contact will find that eye contact remains too uncomfortable to even attempt it. This would show that their eye contact avoidance is not merely a matter of them not seeing any utility in a pointless social game.
I can only speak for my own view, which is that I find making eye contact uncomfortable, and I find that when I do make eye contact it seems like I must be “doing it wrong” because it seems to make others uncomfortable too. Granted I may be reading others’ reactions wrong, the possibility of which contributes to my own discomfort!
As pointed out in another thread, the population of cultures in the world where not making eye contact is the social norm likely exceeds that where it is, so no - not neurotypical population.