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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 π€£
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?"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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." π
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" π’
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)
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.
A lot of tests are simply worded poorly.
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.
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?
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. Iβm like constantly trying to pick words with as little ambiguity as possible so people donβt misunderstand me. Yet it happens all the time. So now I often talk like a goofball robot AND people donβt understand the exact intent of my word choices.
I was diagnosed as ADD as a kid, so Iβm definitely some amount of ND.
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 didnβt 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?
Pretty sure part of the test is completing it with a professional so you can ask them as you go.
I really dislike questions like this. Iβm just ND enough where I get both sides of the question and itβs almost immobilizing. What do they actually want? I gotta overthink this.
No, people donβt tell me, but I get what they might say. Even though itβs 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?
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?
I mean why would they include βpeople tell meβ in the question if it wasnβt important!
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