Anders Sandberg’s take on How Power Corrupts brings to light a particular cognitive bias associated with power imbalances that I think has much relevance to issues of morphological/cognitive liberty, diversity, and self-transformation in a technologically enabling society.
In follow-up experiments it was found that high-power subjects also tended to assume other people had the same information that they had (the “telepathic boss” problem - the boss assumes that everybody knows what he knows and want). They were also less accurate than low-power subjects at judging emotional expressions. There were also anticorrelations between reports of general feelings of being in power in one’s life and tendency to take other’s perspective. Overall high-power people seem to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point and this impairs their ability to consider what others see, think and feel.
This certainly correlates with some of my own observations—for instance, some of my elementary school age-peers seemed to be convinced that it was okay to taunt and even physically attack me. I never really understood why at the time, but looking back, it’s pretty clear that they were in a position of power simply by virtue of there being more of them. Plus, they were more neurologically and socially similar to one another than to me, so it was more difficult for them to see me as a person with feelings and independent thoughts. The social institutions of clique, fad, and fashion were so obvious and tangible to many (though certainly not all) of my classmates that my utter disregard for these things (due to sheer lack of interest on my part) was seen as an anomaly and, probably, a kind of threat that needed to be checked.
Learning to uphold morphological liberty in practice must necessarily include the development of a habit of catching and checking one’s visceral reactions to the existence of certain kinds of people. Though bullying is generally associated with playgrounds, cafeterias, and people under the age of 18, it is a phenomenon that most certainly does not disappear when one enters the adult world. In addition, there is such a thing as cross-generational bullying (e.g., child abuse and elder abuse). And it is readily apparent that whatever form it takes, bullying can frequently be tied to configuration-discrimination and the perception that some people are just too inconvenient for a particular environment or paradigm.
In addition, improper treatment of individuals (including the denial of certain kinds of freedom to particular individuals) can also, to some extent, be a consequence of misconception. For example, at the end of his essay on “How Power Corrupts”, Anders Sandberg writes:
Maybe we should just promote people with Asperger syndrome to management in favour of people with intact theory of mind. That way we will not reduce the total human ability to see things from other perspectives.
I know that the “autistics lack theory of mind” meme has seen some popularity in the media, and superficially might seem to explain a lot, but I am not convinced that it does.
Typical tests used to assess Theory of Mind in children suffer from
a number of weaknesses, to the point where their veracity might be seen as superficial at best. As pointed out by the author of
Whose Planet Is It Anyway?:
...autistics are more likely to be visual-spatial thinkers, whereas the majority of the population consists of auditory-sequential thinkers. A visual-spatial thinker, upon hearing the question “Where will Sally look for her marble?” will translate that question into mental images of Sally, the marble, and the location of the marble. An auditory-sequential thinker, on the other hand, will focus on the action of looking as a sequential process: Sally first has to look for the marble before she can find it. There is an implied “first” in the question—where is the first place that Sally will look for the marble—but a child who processes language visually may not understand that the question has a sequential component. Instead, such a child may interpret the question as “Where will Sally have to look to find her marble?”
The observation quoted above basically posits an alternative explanation as to why autistic children might perform less accurately on common Theory of Mind tests—perhaps a less obvious-seeming explanation, but then, when you’ve never seen the curve of the globe for yourself or monitored the movements of the moon, sun, stars, and tides to the degree necessary to invoke unmistakable suggestions of roundness, it can seem fairly “obvious” that the world is flat.
If a visual-spatial (rather than auditory-sequential) thinking style better explains performance on a test than does the notion that the subject lacks the understanding that other people have independent minds, then science is obligated to follow up on this and remain very careful about the conclusions it draws about autistic minds and personhood.
It would be one thing if autistic people did, in fact, lack Theory of Mind to a greater degree than nonautistic people. If that were the genuine scientific reality, and the data supporting it were really al that conclusive, I’d accept it without protest. But from having observed people from a sort of anthropological viewpoint for years, it is readily apparent to me that the determining factor in being able to accurately interpret another person’s feelings and motivations is not autism or lack thereof, but degree of broad-spectrum similarity between individuals and groups.
If nonautistic people can’t understand autistic people, but autistic people can understand
other autistic people, this is data that cannot be ignored. And as suggested in Anders Sandberg’s “How Power Corrupts”, when a person holds a particular level of power, the degree to which they default to considering the perspectives of others can suffer.
The good news in all this is that Theory of Mind seems to be, rather than a purely innate, “You have it or you don’t” sense, a specific
skill that can be developed further through practice and motivation and experience, regardless (to a degree) of how a person is neurologically wired to begin with. I would wager that people who have had more contact with individuals from cultures other than the one they were born into probably have a better, and more sophisticated, Theory of Mind than people who stay in the same insular community throughout their entire lives. Therefore, one way to improve your Theory of Mind could be to intentionally expose yourself to different cultures and languages. I also suspect that people who learn that the concept of Theory of Mind exists are more likely to develop a better Theory of Mind themselves, and to realize the areas in which they might have been misconstruing their favorite heuristics as genuine insight into other people’s mindsets.
If nonautistic people in any given culture are a majority, the assessment heuristics most commonly applied in this culture will be based members of that majority, for the most part. This makes it look as if members of that majority are able to frequently guess at the feelings and motivations of others. But the trick is that this only works when the “others” in question are similar to a particular critical degree—once the similarity starts breaking down, so does the accuracy of the person’s Theory of Mind.
When I was first diagnosed and began to learn more and more about autism in general, I actually did think of myself as lacking in Theory of Mind, since I have always had difficulty anticipating other people’s actions and understanding their behavior. But then I started realizing that when I read descriptions of people more similarly-wired to me, I
could frequenly understand where they were coming from. And I also realized that just as I frequenly misinterpreted other people, other people just as frequently misinterpreted me.
Over time, I found myself developing a much better sense of how to identify patterns that marked people as “more similar” or “less similar” to me...and now I misinterpret people a lot less frequently than before. And as this concept has percolated, I’ve found that a lot of the energy I used to spend on trying to figure out why other people behaved in such a bizarre and seemingly random manner has been redistributed toward trying to establish better communication with people, and to catch it when people are starting to make assumptions about me so I can set them straight.
Tying this back to the concept of morphological liberty, my point in all this is to demonstrate that when particular misconceptions are perpetuated, people affected by these misconceptions can sometimes end up being treated in a manner consistent with illusion rather than reality. And in favoring the illusion (which can frequently take the form of a convenient, but flawed, conceptual framework) over the person, that person’s freedom is sometimes improperly curtailed.
Individuals making up a society that wishes to hold morphological and cognitive liberty in high regard must remain very cogent of power imbalances and how this affects treatment of, and responses to, aypical people—whether the atypicality is something a person is born with, or whether it is something chosen and adopted in the process of self-creation.
Anne Corwin was an IEET intern 2006-2007, and is an engineer and technoprogressive activist in California. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association, and is active in the longevity movement through the
Methuselah Foundation and in the neurodiversity movement addressing issues along the autism spectrum. Ms. Corwin writes the blog
Existence is Wonderful and produces a related
podcast.
IEET Blog