People with autism or related conditions are often poor at both deception and recognising deception in others. It’s not always the case, but it’s quite a common attribute.
Baron-Cohen’s article explores what we know about some of the differences in autistic thinking, and what might be so different that an effective understanding of deception becomes almost impossible.
He argues that a key skill is ‘meta-representation’, the ability to think about other thoughts, imaginary scenarios or abstract principles in yourself or others.
The key is that it’s not just thinking or imagining, it’s being able to think about thinking or imagining.
When this specifically involves thinking about what other people are thinking, understanding their perspective, it is often called ‘theory of mind‘.
You can see why this is a key skill in deception. You need to have a theory or understanding of what the other person is thinking or is likely to think, to work out how to hide the real state of the world from them.
As people with autism often perform poorly on tasks that test ‘theory of mind’ (despite some debate about whether the experiments are suitable) it has been suggested that a poor understanding of deception is a result of this difficulty.
Baron-Cohen’s article examines some of the research behind these ideas, but also looks at why the human race might have generally evolved to be good deceivers, with some notable exceptions in people who are nowadays likely to be diagnosed with autism.
In other autism news, Bad Science has been doing a fantastic job of tackling dodgy news stories that regularly hit the press, particularly a recent front-page Observer article that seemed to have little trouble deceiving people about autism research.