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gordianus's avatar

> consider this paper that found that neurotypical people give more money to charity when people are watching, but autistic people don’t. The authors write: "[I]n healthy individuals, improving one's social reputation acts as an instrumental reinforcer because better social reputation is rewarding. We think that there are at least two possible explanations for this deficit in ASD individuals. [...]" That is, autistic people being less hypocritical is characterized as a deficit in social reasoning.

When I read this, I thought the paper was correct, because their reasoning is rational (i.e. a rational person should be willing to pay more if they get a greater benefit in the form of a better reputation). However, the details of the method seem to confirm your criticism. The "person watching" in the experiment was "an unfamiliar person" supposedly brought in to compensate for faked computer problems. The expected reputational benefit in this case is likely to be minuscule or zero, since the observed action is (what most would consider) a supererogatory donation & the observer is a stranger whom the experimental subject is likely to never meet again; thus treating the reputational benefit as negligible is the rational decision, & it would probably be more accurate to interpret the study as finding that neurotypical people, but not autistic people, irrationally overvalued the observer's opinion of them.

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philh's avatar

On this specific point:

> Mental illness often isn’t much evidence one way or other about whether someone was victimized. True, many mentally ill people misinterpret “you’re busy” as “you hate me personally and want me to die,” or similar distortions that affect their ability to accurately report on interpersonal situations. But the distortions work both ways. You get mentally ill people going “Eve was busy, so she hates me and wants me to die”, but you also get mentally ill people going “Eve tells me I’m worthless all the time, but I am completely worthless, so she’s just giving me helpful criticism that will help me improve as a person.”

It sounds like you're saying "mentally ill people have a high false positive rate, but they have a high false negative rate too", so it kinda balances out?

But if the context is "a mentally ill person has accused someone of victimizing them and we would like to know if that's true or not", these don't balance out. The opposite, actually: a high false negative rate decreases the probability that any given positive measurement is a true positive.

Consider: someone is tossing a coin and telling you the result. Suppose 10% of the time, if they see tails, they'll say heads. Now when they say heads, you think there's some chance it was tails. (p(heads | they-say-heads) ≈ 90.9%.) But also, 5% of the time if they see heads, they'll say it was tails. Now *when they say heads*, you think the chance it was actually tails is *higher*, becauses the collection "coin flips where they say heads" has the same number of false positives but fewer true positives. (Now p(heads | they-say-heads) ≈ 90.4%.)

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