Anemone's Research Emporium

Reciprocity: the final critique

Anemone Cerridwen
April 19, 2009

The paper: Morton Ann Gernsbacher, 2006. Towards a behavior of reciprocity. Journal of Developmental Processes 1:139-152. Retrieved on January 10, 2009 from http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/gernsbacher_reciprocity.pdf

A link to this paper was posted on WrongPlanet back in January, but I only took a look at it this week. I have to say I am impressed.

Morton Ann Gernsbacher takes a swipe at the double standard around reciprocity and autism. Autistic people are frequently described as lacking in social or emotional reciprocity, but Gernsbacher reminds us that reciprocal behaviour is a two-way street, and that lack of reciprocity in autistic people usually refers to us not responding to non-autistics on their terms, a special type of one-way reciprocity just for us, rather than a true lack of reciprocity.

The Social Reciprocity Scale, which I hadn't heard of before, is one of those scales that appears to measure something in autism by measuring something else, rather like how the EQ measures empathizing in autistics by considering conversational competence. My impression of the SRS from Gernsbacher's description is that, at least on some test items, it measures the degree to which one is a misfit, which she suggests is more a measure of the lack of reciprocity of others rather than that of the autistic. I am very very glad she punctured this scale before I ever heard of it. She saved me at least one major meltdown. Thank you, Dr. Gernsbacher.

Gernsbacher also analyses a study which found that an autistic subject watching the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (not an autistic-friendly film, by my reckoning, because of all the emo hostility) paid more attention to the mouths of the performers and less to the eyes than a control subject did. Gernsbacher points out that autism can involve language impairments, and that other people with language impairments also tend to focus more on the mouth - it helps figure out what people are saying. It's adaptive behaviour, she says, so would anyone consider it "a profound social disability"? Another study I'm glad she saw first.

Then Gernsbacher cites a study that discovered that an autistic child covered his ears in the classroom only when another child was screaming: the teachers apparently couldn't figure out why he kept covering his ears. LISTENING TO A LOT OF LOUD MUSIC RECENTLY?

Then Gernsbacher gets to the good stuff. And I mean good in a good way. Apparently teaching autistic children to behave reciprocally only works when other people reciprocate back again. However, if you concentrate on teaching parents and other kids to behave reciprocally to the autistic person in the first place, that is, relate to them on terms they (we) can understand, the autistic person opens up. Fancy that!

Imagine, if you pay attention to what your child is interested in (something all parents do to begin with), the child picks up on that and you can develop a shared interest, which means you can develop a relationship. Far far different from refusing to relate until the autistic person is interested in whatever you're interested in. While it's perfectly reasonable to not want to be a BFF (best friend forever) with someone who doesn't care about the same things you do, when an autistic person depends on you to learn social skills in the first place, or to participate in society in a basic food-and-shelter kind of way, it's not about being BFFs, it's about being socially responsible parents, family members, teachers, classmates, landlords, employers, etc.

I would like to thank the researchers Gernsbacher cites who did this research, and I would like to thank Gernsbacher for writing this badly needed paper. We need more people like these researchers: people who can see us as people and want to include us in society, rather than people who think we're defective and need fixing, or people who see us as an opportunity for greater glory for them ("look at me, the great researcher!") without necessarily considering their effect on us.

Imagine, reciprocity as a two-way street. I want to live in that town.

Postscript

I'm not going to be doing any more of these critiques (though I may write more essays). I'm tired, nobody seems to care, and it's like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon. Academics can always run circles around the rest of us because, basically, they get paid to. It's their day job, they have the resources, and they tend to listen to each other rather than the rest of us, so what's to stop them?

Non-autistic researchers will continue to publish research that misrepresents and misses the point of autism as long as they consult only each other and not us. Almost all researchers on autism are not autistic. Imagine research on women done only by men, or research on homosexuality done only by heterosexuals, or research on one race done only by other races - it's easy to goof when you don't have the inside scoop, even with the best of intentions.

On the other hand, when researchers do consult us, especially when they include us on their research teams or hang out with us in real life and see the day-to-day stuff of our lives, it can make a huge difference.

I suspect that at some point it will be necessary to set up some sort of formal subject review (literature review by subjects prior to publication), parallel to peer review, in order to make sure that research is fair and to the point. "Nothing about us without us!" In the meantime, if researchers are particularly bad, it may be necessary to run public information campaigns, lobby research funders for fairer funding, or maybe even file human rights complaints.

Fortunately, in amongst all the academese for the sake of academese, there are some particularly good researchers, researchers who actually see us for who we are, who pay attention to the problems we have (as opposed to the problems others have with us), and who actually try to help. For which I am truly grateful. And that's the note I want to end on.