Tell me the tests are not considering masking capability… 😁🙄
How likely are you to recommend our product to your friends?
Extremely unlikely, because I just dont talk about random products to my friends…
We once had a great argument at work between HR and a senior developer, who didn’t have friends and if he had, prefered them to not work at the same company, hence answering straight 0 to how likely he would recommend the employer to his friends. He absolutely enjoyed working there nevertheless.
Haha yeah, I am on the workforce going on three decades, and no way I’d mix work and play.
Few years back my employer tried to start a local tech conference. All of us got invite codes, “50% off for your friends”. If you had a certain number of referrals you’d get a cash bonus on top, dont remember how much, couple hundred bucks. I passed that code on exactly zero times, because of course I wouldn’t ask my friends to spend money and obvs for me that was a work event. Why would I want my private circle there?
I’ve brought on two friends to my current job because they were in desperate situations. One of them has been ok to work with but complains all the time. The other one pissed me off so bad after three weeks that our argument (this was like the third verbal argument) was very nearly a fistfight. I knew it was gonna be like this. Better than having my friends living on the street.
Exactly, that would be a hard pass from me too haha
This wasn’t a test for any kind of neurodivergence, but on a test for a job many years ago I was presented with the question “would you ever think about taking money from the cash register?”
So… Clearly the answer they wanted was “no”, right? But the act of reading and understanding the question requires you to think about taking money from the cash register! Even if just to reject the idea.
I answered “yes” thinking I was so clever for spotting their trick question. Turns out that was not their intent and I grossly over thought it.
I did not get the job.
There’s another layer to this:
First layer is “the question is about whether or not you’ll steal”.
Second layer is “the question is worded in such a way that yes is the only truthful answer”.
Third layer is “will you lie anyways to protect yourself and your job?”. Like guessing that the manager would rather deal with liars on their staff than people who might blab about shit that can get the manager in trouble. They want people who will prioritize the job over following labour laws to the letter.
also, like, how else are you going to give change
Or do the count at the end of the night?
You must only put money into the magic box
Turns out that was not their intent and I grossly over thought it.
Yeah, I fell for this when I was just starting out job hunting. It’s basically a “is this your first time taking an employment test?” Test, because it’s very clear they just want you to lie to them once you realize what answers are failing.
The answer is obviously yes. You have to give change.
If you’re working a cash register they probably don’t want people who think too deeply either. It’s sort of like that famous case where the police department refused to hire people with high or low IQs
OOPs initial instinct was correct. You’re supposed to answer truthfully based on your actual observed experiences, not answer questions about others’ assessments your behavior with your own internal assessment of that behavior. Overthinking surveys can skew answers inappropriately.
I think overthinking on surveys might have a correlation with autism
Maybe there should be another two questions to every question:
A- How much time did you take to think about the answer this question?
B- Which was the other answer you were considering chosing?
Overthinking multiple choice questions, stressing about all the ways in which the answers could be ambiguous, and considering the intention of each question and how it fails to adequately address the thing that it’s attempting to.
Yeah, that tracks…
Do neurotypicals really not consider such things? I feel like anything I ever say I think through a million different ways it might be taken.
That comes from a lifetime of being misinterpreted. If everything you say from when you’re a teen until your late twenties gets taken in a million different ways other than that you intended, you start to over analyze the response to every question you give, you need to be able to anticipate every way that neurotypicals will misunderstand you and mitigate against it.
And no, neurotypicals do not consider such things, because that experience rarely if ever happens to them.
Is there a study beyond confirmation bias that shows this? Not being offensive, I’d just love to read it.
you need to be able to anticipate every way that neurotypicals will misunderstand you and mitigate against it.
How NT manage to understand each other?
My best guess is that they have a secret code that they all somehow intuitively understand. I must have missed the class where you learn that code…
Do neurotypicals really not consider such things?
I wouldn’t know.
I feel like anything I ever say I think through a million different ways it might be taken.
Same, and often I’m still blindsided by the way it ends up getting taken. What’s worse is that my mitigating steps get mistaken even worse!
Same, and often I’m still blindsided by the way it ends up getting taken. What’s worse is that my mitigating steps get mistaken even worse!
Absolutely way too true haha
We consider it, but briefly, as our brain throwing it out as irrelevant and out of context.
Personally, I assume the receptor will interpret the message in the best way possible. It’s hardly at all possible to say something that can’t be taken the wrong way if the receptor is keen on starting a fight.
I guess I always assume the worst and try to preface things to get ahead of incorrect interpretations lol
And that’s precisely why it sucks to be a social pariah. Once people get it into their heads that everyone already hates you, they start manufacturing reasons to justify and perpetuate their hatred.
A lot of tests are simply worded poorly.
I don’t have autism but I think this is a bad question. It’s not asking about the test taker, it’s asking about their social circle.
Like if you mostly talk to other autistic people in your life, you’re gonna get called out for it less than if you worked at a corporate office
The issue with asking about the test taker is that it’s often hard to have a frame of reference - whatever you’re used to is normal. There’s not really an easy solution.
Yesss! Same problem with other tests like ADHD: questions are like “do you often get up and walk around the room in unfitting situations?”
I mean I have the urge but I learned to mask for my whole life. Obvs I’m not DOING it, I just have the strong urge and stopping me takes up all my attention. But that’s not part of the question?
Oh this is a huge problem in autism tests too ! “Unfitting/Inappropriate situations” : Buddy, if I knew when the situation was not appropriate for this, I basically wouldn’t be autistic 🤣
This goes hand-in-hand with the questions where I’m like, “Well, I did that a lot as a child, but I don’t do it anymore now.” It’d be nice if the tests provided clarification at the top to indicate if we’re supposed to respond “yes” to things that we used to do. Considering that childhood behaviors give more clues than adult ones, it makes sense to answer from the past. But at the same time, the test is using the present tense, so to be technically correct I should answer with what I do today. Right? Maybe they should say, “Do you, or have you ever, done blah blah blah?” The fact that this stuff isn’t spelled out goes to show that neurotypicals designed these things.
I imagine that having a big ol’, multi-paragraph explanation of these sorts of details might end up skipped by NTs, which maybe plays part in why these tests don’t bother with that - designers are seeing it from the NT angle. However, I don’t imagine such a text would scare off autistic people - more information to help us navigate an important, novel task? Yes, please! I will read that wall of text as if my life depended on it, because the ambiguous questions leave me stuck far longer than they probably should and any additional clarification would be welcome.
At the very least, maybe the laziest way (from the designers’ standpoint) to resolve this, would be to include optional “additional information” boxes so we can relieve these anxieties by explaining the conditional nature of some of our answers. Yeah, a simple scale is easier for documentation and diagnosis, but that sort of simplicity doesn’t track with how brains (and many things) actually work. Humans are complicated. Neurodiversity is complicated. Anything related to mental health at all is complicated. Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for the simplest route to understanding each others’ brains, but the route that more accurately conveys our brains’ nuanced topography.
I am fascinated to try to imagine what an autism test developed by an autistic autism researcher would be like. I suspect it would be a wild ride.
“Would you like spend the next eight hours discussing my extensive collection of model trains?”
“If you were to hand write a complete description of the texture of your least favorite food, how many pages of paper would be required?”
One of the tests I did for my assessment did actually have multiple options like that! “Only when I was a child” “only as an adult” “as a child and an adult”, not exact wording but the answers were to to that effect!
I think the ability to “mask” weighs somewhat against a diagnosis.
Like with annoyance and concerted effort I can sit still when it is absolutely critical. However I still get up and walk around in unfitting situations, often without realizing I am. Until someone mentions how weird it is. Or mentions they would prefer I keep knives out of my reach because they are scared when I start flipping one around and give me some safer “toy” to fidget with in trade.
A lot of these are things most folks are inclined to do., but the inability to control is the thing, not the urge in the first place.
Yes. The definition of normal is the ability to tolerate suppression. To be clinical, the disorder must actually disrupt your life. If the stress of masking is a life disruptor, that’s also a criteria, but just not doing shit you have an urge to do is normal no matter what people say.
The fact that you have to mask something in a situation like that is the point, not the severity. You may mean well, but you’re gatekeeping mental health issues by saying “if you are still able to control yourself, you are not sick enough”. That is something that still prevents a lot of people from getting the help they need.
There’s a balance to be struck.
People with entirely normal urges think they are somehow divergent, because they see others act on urges and people make it clear that was “weird” for the urge to be acted out and mistake having the urge for being the “weird” thing rather than the expression.
I want to get up and walk around and listening to this person talking is a waste of my time. That’s a perfectly normal urge. The inability to either supress the urge, or the inability to recognize it as a problematic social interaction when it would be, that’s where problems come in.
Yes, this! Masking isn’t considered in a lot of these questions. Especially when it’s like “have other people told you that you do this thing”. No they haven’t but yes I do do that thing but I know it’s looked down on so I internalize it and nobody can see I do the thing! Why is this about what others can see?
I hate multiple choice, I always want to scribble “depends on circumstances” answer 😂 am I alone, or with someone I trust, a complete stranger, another country, a medical setting? It all changes the answer!
Would you be ok to share a link of that kind of adhd test ?
Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS), is the one I used . It’s important to know that this isn’t any “test”. It’s just a screening tool that helps when used in dialogue with a health professional. This post in question showing why that is important.
Other comment is correct: I was referring to the ASRS self screening for adults developed by the WHO. This is only meant to give you an indicator if you should talk to a health professional, not a diagnosis.
I hated that question, it’s a simple yes or no on a factual statement - either people do tell you or they don’t, there’s no degrees of agreement. Anyway, turns out I’m autistic.
Just asking for opinions on these forms and questions would probably be a more accurate way to gauge autism anyway. Never met a fellow autist that didn’t have something to say about how annoyingly imprecise these forms always are
Evert thought comes with Bonus Context
Maybe complaining that they are imprecise is actually part of the diagnostic test…
I am wondering what you guys think about this one:
27% German 53% Autistic
But those are bad, those are always missing crucial clarifying details that could change the answer.
Not for NT
After asking for clarifications about the exact meaning of a question for the 20th time, I think my therapist was already decided about my diagnosis, even before we finished with the rest of the tests.
The real test is taking the test
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I mean why would they include “people tell me” in the question if it wasn’t important!
Because it is important.
You think you are being too literal but folks around you might not.
The intent is to catch being so literal it causes friction in social interactions. You fall to recognize the intended meaning behind interactions. People get actively annoyed to the point they let you know.
Self assessment is not going to work too well, you have to provide externally observed phenomenon.
No, of course not. They choose less kind words to express that.
🫠
I really dislike questions like this. I’m just ND enough where I get both sides of the question and it’s almost immobilizing. What do they actually want? I gotta overthink this.
No, people don’t tell me, but I get what they might say. Even though it’s not actually what another person would say out loud, but they might be thinking it, yet I know thr question is actually asking me about myself.
Who tf writes questions like this?
But it is trying to ask about others’ assessmemt of you. Because if you describe your self assessment, you aren’t going to do a good job.
If you are totally oblivious, then you won’t recognize.
Conversely, you think you take everything too literally but none of your peers notice anything unusual.
It has to be so bad that your daily social interactions are damaged because folks are annoyed that you don’t understand and can’t help but to let you know.
If on the other hand you perceive the intent but just also constantly think about what the literal meaning would be, that’s not really a sign, because you were able to perceibe the intended message too.
I don’t think this is so much autism as just caring about details.
Communication is like that, someone has some idea or concept, they use words / symbols, then the other person translates that back to some concept.
Being aware of the whole chain, to me, is a requirement for making good questions.
A classic is: “how likely are you to recommend our products to friends & family”. Which I’m sure is trying to gague the level of pride and anthusiams for the products. But then, why not ask that question instead? The element of “I don’t go recommending anything to friends and family… that’d weird”, probably makes the responses less useful.
the thing is neurotypical people don’t have as much awareness of the imprecision of language, they just assume they know what you’re saying if they are familiar with all the words you use. this has caused me no end of problems when I say something and the person I’m talking to just chooses an interpretation and assumes thats what I meant and runs with it. half the time that ends up in some kind of minor or major disagreement that could have been avoided if they just asked for some clarification. the really annoying part is it doesn’t seem to matter how precisely I formulate my sentences, how much I hedge against misunderstanding, because sometimes people just make shit up that they think I might say even if it has nothing to do with what I actually said. watch it happen here lol.
lol I think I just realized why I talk the way I do. I’m like constantly trying to pick words with as little ambiguity as possible so people don’t misunderstand me. Yet it happens all the time. So now I often talk like a goofball robot AND people don’t understand the exact intent of my word choices.
I was diagnosed as ADD as a kid, so I’m definitely some amount of ND.
I also have ADHD, not sure about autism spectrum. My current boss gets absolutely frustrated with me because I constantly explain what I mean. He says I knew what you meant when you were halfway through talking, stop explaining yourself. I didn’t even realize how much I do it until I started working for him. I do it so I’m not misunderstood.
It’s funny because he has ADHD as well but is unmedicated. His statements and especially text messages are vague to me. It causes serious communication issues because he gets upset when asked to explain or repeat himself. So I have to either piss him off and get confirmation, or just run with what I think he meant and hope I’m right.
I don’t think this is so much autism as just caring about details.
Most people figure out the context and fill in the details.
I’m reading this wondering if this is tounge in cheek, or if you really have no idea how you really just doubled down on that autism.
Yes and I think non autistic/ADHD people do that like unconsciously, right? Fill in the context?
Whereas a huge part of autism for a lot of us IS “caring about the details” very consciously and needing those details explicitly stated to understand what I think others just understand?
That’s my simplified understanding.
That’s always I possibility. If you’re genuinely arguing it, then it makes the whole discussion fairly dismissive and too reductive to be of any value. But, I’ll entertain it for a bit.
Your argument here is the good’ol “but you get what they’re trying to say here?”, or as you put it “figure out the context and fill in the details”, right? Why stop there tho? Surely you should follow it up with an argument as to why you object to removing such guesswork, with better formulated questions?
Neurotypical people wouldn’t feel that there was any guesswork, as all the context and details are already covered by the words in the sentence, the situation the sentence is being said in, or the subtext of that sentence being the one they chose to say. You wouldn’t be disambiguating anything, just redundantly restating things.
Funny thing with logical contradictions is that it works both ways. Your argument implies that neurotypicals cannot understand certain questions. In particular, “how likely are you to recommend our products to friends & family”, literally, at face value.
Weird argument to make, don’t you think?
- it wasn’t my argument
- the question has an implicit in a hypothetical scenario where you were having a conversation where it would be relevant aspect that most people would recognise even though the words don’t literally include it, and if you did literally want to ask them whether they’d start such a conversation out of the blue, you’d have to add extra words to say so. The literal interpretation would be an absurd thing to ask about, and people subconsciously recognise that, so don’t consider it.
Well fuck me. How can i make it this far in life not realizing “would you recommend this to…” explicitly implied the hypothetical. I’ve always thought “I guess maybe if it came up, but when the hell would this ever come up? What a dumb ass question…” Even answering no because no one i know would even know what this product is.
Fucking fuck I’m a dumb ass. Lmao
It’s not so much your argument, as being the implication of what you are saying.
There was some hint of condescension in your language as to this being a lack of ability in one side to (paraphrasing) “get the obvious context”, and at the same time attribute this to (I’m assuming) social intelligence, or rather, a lack thereof.
What I’m saying, is that you cannot have it both ways here. If the questionnaire aims to get accurate responses, from everyone, you need accurate questions.
Many people you might think this applies to, are perfectly fine understanding the literal meaning, and also any number of “let’s assume the question is asking something else instead”-variations. Not that this even matters, as just by accepting the possible existence of variability in how different groups might “be able to understand the obvious context clues”, the way you unify responses in the sense of “answering the same question”, is by making questions less ambiguous.
Which brings me back to my comment as to how communication works. Concept - symbols - concept. This is always dependant on overlapping agreement in translations at either end, which also depends on context, explicit and implicit. My only argument, the one that you considered might have been tongue in cheek, is that if you want coherent responses to a question, you are better served by a wording that minimises the need for a shared implicit context.
The specifics of my example, I’m guessing, is what you confuse with the more general point. I’m sure that even tho we disagree as to where to draw the line, the general point is still valid.
To refer back to the original post, you are taking things too literally, and in doing so, missing meaning that is present in the symbols. As a rough analogy, DXT1 GPU texture compression has two modes. Both start by storing two colours, then they diverge. They both store a number from zero to three per pixel, but in one mode, zero to three all mean interpolating between the two endpoint colours, and in the other mode, zero to two are for interpolation, and three means that the pixel is transparent. There’s no bit explicitly storing which mode’s being used, but the information is there. The two stored colours should also be interpreted as two numbers, and if the higher one is first, then you use the first mode, and if the higher one is second, then you use the second mode. If the colours were interpreted too literally, they’d only be seen as colours, but an implementation can see that there was a choice to put the colours in a particular order, and read into that. There’s no abiguity, people just need to know about the rule and apply it.
For communicating with the public, there are enough people that are barely literate that asking the simplest version of a question is going to cover more of the population than one that adds all the necessary qualification to ensure someone that takes everything literally knows it’s a hypothetical.
Your argument here is the good’ol “but you get what they’re trying to say here?”
You and test don’t exist in a vacuum: you can conjure context from your knowledge about the world.
Not denying that. Do you think that is the argument here?
Point is - the question from test is good enough.
If you only want answers from the type of people who can conjure this information, and do so in the same way, sure. What a weird thing to assume about the people answering the question, huh?
I mean, additional questions and struggle from the respondent are valuable insight by itself in this context.
But you’re adding to the question. It doesn’t ask how often people tell you that at all. It literally just asks if people tell you that, which they do.
It’s a statement of a thing that you experience and then asks you specifically to agree or disagree with it. Literally.: people do this thing.
There is nothing, nonspecific word, that make that sentence a question, regardless of intent. It has nothing like a question in the wording.
YOU are adding you the question. OP is literally only reading what is stated without adding anything.
So no it doesn’t literally just ask if people tell you that. You are interpreting it differently than it reads verbatim.
I do believe that is the entire point of OP posting this
It still makes no mention of frequency it just says people say it, which they do. OP still went further than the statement by adding how often it happens.
I think that’s the appropriate answer
Yeah, it is. A major part of an autism diagnosis is how others perceive you. For example, as a neurodevelopmental disorder, bringing in people who knew you as a child to describe how you behaved is heavily emphasized in adult diagnoses. If they wanted to know what you think of yourself, they would’ve asked that.
But they didn’t ask how people perceive you.
They asked what people tell you about their perception of you.
How it is stated is best.
If you ask what other people think of you, well now you are right back to what you guess other people think of you. Which may be more projecting your own thoughts than them.
Unless testing for paranoia, you need to keep it concrete as you can.
The being too literal is so severe that others will absolutely tell you. Your internal thought process recognizing both the intended figurative meaning whole also considering the literal is fine.
Maybe it should be more about falling to recognize figurative communication rather than ability to consider the literal meaning of communication.
Well, yes, because there’s imperfect data. I said that others’ perception of you is important, and the extent to which they remark on that is a proxy. Do I really need to explain the concept that you can’t read minds or (practicably) gather a representative sample of people in your life into a neuropsychologist’s office and thus what people tell you is the closest proxy?
For a post about taking things too literally instead of putting words in someone else’s mouth, you’re ironically putting words in my mouth instead of taking what I’m saying literally.
I didn’t sense any hostility in OP’s reply. It sounds like they’re referring to the test, stating its own directions. They’re not making any claims about it, or expressing a lack of understanding, let alone putting words in anyone’s mouth?
You’re right, witnesses to our childhood are important for adult diagnoses. The issue OP’s referring to isn’t whether or not others’ perceptions should be part of the picture, but rather that the wording of many autism tests (such as the one in the post) ask a question that depends on you recalling what others have perceived about you. The test I took didn’t use “say,” instead some questions expected me to somehow know what others think about me. These sorts of questions are kind of twisted to ask an autistic person, since it requires a recursive practice of the social skills we famously struggle with.
Bringing in people from childhood would be far more sensible. However, many of those seeking a diagnosis aren’t going to be brought down that route, as the first thing we’re given is this type of questionnaire. After that, the psych interviews us. I can’t speak for all, but for me that’s all I was given.
People tend to not be super honest about your perceived negative qualities because it’s considered impolite. If the doctor or whoever wants to know what people around me think of me, it needs to be given to those people as an anonymous poll.
e: This kind of question also assumes I interact with anyone to the degree that they have any idea what I’m like.
People also tend not to be very observant or, especially with parents, they have thrown their head in the sand. “No no you are/were a totally normal child”.
That was my parents. “Weird” or “not normal” was bad so the reassurance was always that I was normal. Meanwhile my sister: yeah but remember how she used to watch that one DVD every single day for a year? And she read the same 5 books over and over while she ate the same breakfast every day even when you bought new books? And how you had to stock pile that cereal because if there wasn’t any, she wouldn’t eat anything because that cereal was breakfast and afternoon tea and sometimes dinner." 😂
My assessment involved a couple of hours of talking to my folks and my dad finally reading the end report just said “how did we miss this” 😢
it needs to be given to those people as an anonymous poll
You know exactly why this is a stupid, impractical idea. Yes, that’s “better”. The question in the OP is being filtered not only through what others actively say to you but also the extent to which you weigh those remarks. I understand that. Everyone here understands that.
No neuropsychologist is going to be anonymously polling a representative sample of people you interact with. At best they’ll get a couple family members/caretakers (sometimes a teacher if the person is still in e.g. elementary school) to describe how you present to them. The purpose of questions like this isn’t to hinge your entire diagnosis upon them; it’s to get a bunch of data points and see how they cluster. It doesn’t, therefore, have to be nearly as ridiculously strict as you’re suggesting.
Here’s the autism-spectrum quotient if you’re curious what a real self-response questionnaire looks like. As an example of this style of question: “Other people frequently tell me that what I’ve said is impolite, even though I think it is polite.”
My point isn’t that an anonymous poll is a good idea, but that expecting autists to accurately report on the (potentially secret) feelings of other people isn’t practical either. It’s like how they make you jump through a bunch of beurocratic hoops to get ADHD assessments. The test itself is filtering against positive identification in a number of cases.
is there a test like this for adhd ?
Just to clarify: the AQ isn’t a test for determining on its own that someone is or isn’t autistic. It’s (potentially) one part of a larger assessment.
For ADHD, the ADHD-RS-5 is the most popular structured questionnaire I know of, but much of ADHD screening is less about questionnaires and more about cognitive testing and interviews like DIVA-5.
So if no one interacted with you because you’re weird, you’re not autistic, got it
Or if only people that could tolerate your your literalness because they themselves were at the same level interacted with you, you’re not autistic
(I understand that it’s just one question of many, but yes, it definitely doesn’t need to be an indicator of excessive literalness)
