Stereotypes and Theory of Mind
June 18, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
According to a study to be published in the June 19th issue of Current Biology, autistic children are able to “pick up and endorse” stereotypes about race and sex. These findings are of interest because autistic children are said to lack “theory of mind” (TOM), the ability to understand that others have different mental states—different beliefs and desires—than their own, as today’s Science Daily notes. It might thus be thought that autistic children would not pick up on stereotypes of race or sex, but the contrary was found by researchers led by Lawrence Hirschfeld, a professor of anthropology and psychology of the New School for Social Research in New York.
In fact, the researchers found that autistic children who have a verbal age between 6 and 7 years–and who fail ToM tasks–know and use gender and race stereotypes just like normal children. Hirschfeld said he suspects the stereotypes originate within subtle and seemingly incidental messages that saturate the culture–for example, through advertising or biased attention by the media. The kids might also learn about stereotypes from parental behaviors, such as locking car doors when in certain neighborhoods, even if parents carefully monitor what they say about race to their children.
Stereotypes are not inherently negative, he said. “We wouldn’t be able to think without social categories,” he said. “Stereotypical roles are important for navigating everyday interactions. Finding a plumber would be difficult if we thought of people only as unique individuals. Getting through the check-out line would be unwieldy if we didn’t have simple scripts about the roles that both shoppers and cashiers play.”
Indeed, the researchers suggest that their findings provide clues to the “different kinds” of social reasoning that autistic children have strengths in, namely a “surprising ability to recognize broad categories of people”—-to recognize social categories in people. It also seems to me that their research provides some evidence about autistic persons having more theory of mind—having theory of mind—while using different ways to figure out what another person might be thinking.
And, perhaps this research points to the need to reconsider the notion of “theory of mind” as itself a possible stereotype about autism.
I don’t believe in the Theory of Mind explanation at all. However, I fail to understand why ToM would be related at all to understanding stereotypes. We learn stereotypes through teaching, like the alphabet, language and whether to use a fork or spoon at the table.
Parents may deny teaching stereotypes but we do it all the time. It can be by repeating legends, refusing to associate with certain people or groups, by physically sheltering our kids from images, jokes, not correcting prejudicial slurs, etc. You don’t have to be able read social and/or emotional cues to memorize what your parents (teachers, friends) believe about other groups.
Oh for goodness sake that thery is so old it has hairs on it, nobody takes it seriosly anymore, even SBC has moved onto to something altogether more sexier and controversial that will sell more books.
Theory of mind seems to be the theory that won’t go away.
From reading about this study, I took the sense that the researchers are taking a stereotype to be a belief or attitude, and therefore a sort of “mental state.” After reading about the study, I had to wonder about how its results might be applied to stereotypes about autism.
So glad you posted about this . . . I read it earlier today and was just annoyed. One of the hardest thing for me with Sweet M is stereotype-busting . . . that it’s okay to play with “boy’s toys” and so on. Stereotypes are a sort of rigidity of thinking that neurotypicals are extremely fond of . . . Would we expect that our sometimes less than flexible children would be any less fond of these categories? It’s really aggravating how researchers underestimate our kids.
I think I will keep overestimating mine, and M too of course.