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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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, it’s actually asking me about myself.
Who tf writes questions like this?
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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
But those are bad, those are always missing crucial clarifying details that could change the answer.
Maybe complaining that they are imprecise is actually part of the diagnostic test…
I am wondering what you guys think about this one:
Evert thought comes with Bonus Context
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 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.
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
you’re being tested the moment you are referred by a doctor or decide to make the call yourself. my referral was made 2 weeks ago & i haven’t called them back. ik this is will be noted in documentation when i finally make the appointment.
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 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.
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
You’d be great mathematician… Or at least math test solver
Pretty sure part of the test is completing it with a professional so you can ask them as you go.
I’m fairly sure the last time i did that, she got slightly angry eventually.
Though she did last the longest, every other person usually gets angry much quicker.
:(
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.
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.
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.”
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)
