Molly Helt discovered an interesting aspect of her son’s autism somewhat serendipitously, during a plane ride. When the plane descended, in an attempt to help relieve painful pressure in her son’s ears, she tried to get him to yawn by yawning right in front of him.
About 45 percent of us yawn when we see someone else yawn, but Helt’s yawns had no such effect on her little one.
The observation prompted Helt, a clinical psychology researcher at the University of Connecticut, to investigate the contagious yawning in children with autism.
“Yawning when you see someone else yawn requires empathy, on a certain level,” Helt said.
She found that most children with autism are unlikely to copy this behavior, and the finding may help scientists better understand important aspects of human communication and social behavior that children with autism don’t experience.
https://www.livescience.com/10076-kids-autism-experience-contagious-yawning.html
Social mimicry is a social behavior largely exhibited by non-autistics, in simple terms, they automatically copy what they observe in someone else – monkey see, monkey do. Autistics more often are not as susceptible to it, all to differing degrees.
Social mimicry had certain benefits althroughout our evolutionary history. Let’s say one caveman is running away from a wild animal that isn’t visible to their tribe yet and now signals with panicked hand gestures that there is a danger to the tribe, then it is simply beneficial for the other cavemen to be susceptible to social cues and body language, understand what the caveman is signalling, then starting to run away as well.
If you’re too autistic to register the social cue and focused on analyzing objects, you might be the first one to get eaten by the wild animal, only taking notice of it once it is too late to act on the evidence of its existence.
As with many other biases and social behaviors exhibited by neurotypicals to this day, evolution did not necessarily favor a 100% accurate, rational, systematic perception of reality that is closer to that of an autist, but often rapid acting based on social intuitions and gut instincts instead.
On each of five trials, each child was asked to watch carefully as a demonstrator showed how to retrieve a toy from a box or build a simple object. Importantly, each demonstration included two necessary actions (e.g. unclipping and removing the box lid) and one unnecessary action (e.g. tapping the top of the box twice).
The box was then reset behind a screen and handed to the child, who was instructed to “get or make the toy as fast as you can.” They were not specifically told to copy the behavior they’d just seen.
Investigators discovered almost all of the children successfully reached the goal of getting or making the toy, but typically developing children were much more likely to include the unnecessary step as they did so, a behavior known as overimitation.
Those children copied 43 to 57 percent of the unnecessary actions, compared to 22 percent in the children with autism. That’s despite the fact that the children correctly identified the tapping action as “silly,” not “sensible.”
Researchers now plan to investigate precisely what kind of actions children copy, and how that tendency to copy everything might contribute to human cultural transmission of knowledge.
Hamilton said parents and teachers should be aware of the social value in going beyond the successful completion of such tasks.
https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/04/09/autistic-kids-tend-to-imitate-efficiently-not-socially/53604.html
What must be pointed out in all of this is that many behaviors that have been selected for also have immense disadvantages, especially in our modern environment, which is often missed by neurotypicals that exhibit these certain biases and social behaviors themselves, thus often fail to critically examine its negative effects and only think of the autist as deficient for not acting like a copying machine.
Social mimicry is also why neurotypicals are susceptible to social indoctrination and many people to this day still value what their culturally isolated tribe/group says instead of what science indicates.
The earth is not flat, but their tribe says that it is flat, so because there have been certain survival benefits to following the tribe, they fail to reject the false information (that the earth is flat) because they want to keep being a member of the tribe, which entails rejecting the correct information (that the earth is not flat).
They are bad at logical argumentation and subconsciously run every argument they hear through a list of vapid social concerns rather than to address the argument itself.
- Would saying this in public enhance my social status?
- Would saying this in public enhance my social status, thus my sexual success?
- What does the person making this argument look like?
- What is the social status of the person making this argument?
- What is the consensus of my primitive tribe on this person making this argument?
- What is the hidden intent of the person making this argument?
- What is the legal (majority voted on) status of what this argument proposes?
It influences public morals and laws – the neurotypical develops a strong attachment to certain rules without being able to exactly explain why said rules are important, they simply copied it at some point throughout their development and never questioned the belief, then said neurotypicals are often angered by an autist rejecting and questioning their inconsistent beliefs that they cling to simply for membership of the tribe.
Some examples of beliefs resulting out of automatic social mimicry would include:
- Religion:
A normative human may be more likely to believe in god over allah, although in objective reality, there exists no evidence for the existence of either any more than for the existence of the easter bunny. They can see the insane belief for what it is when they witness someone who believes in a different fantasy world narrative, but they can’t see it in themselves, they believe in their particular god as it is written about in the book about their particular god simply because they grew up in a culture that believed in said particular god.
- Speciesism:
A normative human may be more likely to believe in the sacredness of one animal over another, in objective reality, of course any sentient animal wants to avoid harm, you don’t want to avoid harm because you have human DNA, you want to avoid it because you’re sentient, if you were braindead you wouldn’t care about avoiding the knife in your throat.
Non-human animals and human animals are alike in their interest not to experience suffering, the pain of a dog is the same as the pain of a pig. But for no other reason than that they grew up in a cult where dogs are worshipped and pigs are put in gas chambers, a majority of social pantomimes end up believing that there is just something inherently ”wrong” with killing a dog but not a pig.
They can see violence and cruelty when they look at a different culture that mistreats the sacred dog, they get angry and want to torture the perceived heathens of this different culture to death slowly for the atrocities (it’s bad because it causes suffering, not because it’s a dog) they commit, whilst chugging down the tit juice of a tortured cow, and if they lived in some different part of the world, they’d be chugging down cow’s piss without thinking about it, it’s the same exact function of a social copying machine.
- Drug laws:
Alcohol and cigarettes are drugs, but ”drugs” are thought of as something that is illegal, forbidden by the tribe, so often people say ”alcohol and/or drugs” as if ethanol is not a drug, this is because of social mimicry – they learned that certain drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, heroine are forbidden in their tribe, so they only call those drugs drugs, drugs that they take legally they fail to even consider as drugs intuitively.
The alcohol they put in their bodies is probably much unhealthier and dangerous than many other potentially illegal drugs they could be taking, but they don’t acknowledge that, when it comes to the illegal drug they say ”but people could do bad things on these drugs and die of it!” without acknowledging that people do bad things on the socially acceptable drugs that they’re taking and they still accept the usage of said drug because they understand that the usage of the drug alcohol doesn’t cause harm to someone else, so it’d be unfair to arrest everyone that drinks it just because some do bad things on it.
But they only see that when it comes to the socially acceptable drug, when it comes to a drug drug, they are perfectly fine with ruining someone’s life for taking it, because they’re ruining their lives with that drug….so let’s just lock them up and ruin their life for them so then it’s ruined anyway!
- Age of consent:
Although you could argue that the lower we go in age, the more likely a person might be to be manipulated into sex due to their lower intelligence, this doesn’t mean that just because a person of said age is having sex, it must be the result of some sort of evil scheme or abuse, they could just be wanting to have sex at an earlier age than is socially acceptable as well.
Regardless of an official age of consent law, it can made illegal to rape, force and manipulate someone to have sex with you, the age of consent serves to arrest people for having sex with someone who consented under what is considered the holy number, it offends religious sensibilites, different groups of neurologically normative humans deeply believe that the age of their particular location is the correct one and harmless sexual encounters under that age are simply never possible, only because they grew up in that particular location.
Even if there were some kind of particular IQ you needed to consent to sex scientifically speaking, which I don’t believe exists any particular evidence whatsoever for, and you showed these normative humans that the 15 year old under the holy age of 16 possessed all the same exact attributes the average 16 year old possessed to consent to sex, they would still reject the idea because it’s not 16, so it’s always unacceptable.
- Genital mutilation:
Even if there is no medical reason (to avoid some sort of actual, greater harm) to cut the genitalia of a child, many cults still believe that it must be done, often times because of another belief based in social mimicry in one of many fantasy creatures like god or allah.
They will use all sorts of rationalizations for this from hygiene (as if soap doesn’t exist in the first world) to straight up denying cutting a sensitive part of someone’s genitals off, leaving it without protective skin could ever impair sexual function at any point, otherwise they’d have to admit that their genitals also have been harmed and their orgasms might not be as satisfying as they could be, they’d have to go against the tribe’s belief, this produces discomfort.
Supporters of genital mutilation in the form of ripping foreskins off will then often times be outraged that one would compare their barbarism to the mutilation of vaginas, also primarily because they from social hear-say blindly parroted from members of their cult that female genital mutilation is of course much much worse than male genital mutilation and ought never be compared under any circumstance.
Although in reality, it of course simply depends on how you are mutilating the child. Some cultures cut off more, some cut off less. Some cut the girl’s skin around the clitoris off, this is more similar to the process of cutting a foreskin off, some more violent cultures cut the entire pussy open, some cultures cut the entire penis open and then stick their penises in that cut open penis, it’s just social mimicry – wherever you grow up (without being autistic enough to see through it).
A question that comes up in all of this though is that if neurologically normative humans are predisposed to copying social behavior so much, where has the behavior started? Generation after generation, neurotypicals copy the behavior of other neurotypicals, but at some point, the trend must have been set for them to copy, someone must have started engaging in the behavior, and this is where it gets a little bit darker.
The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.
Joseph Goebbels
Despite there being autistics and non-autistics, there are also psychopaths and narcissists. Psychopaths lack empathy, but they are also good at manipulating neurotypicals to do their bidding.
At first blush this may seem counterintuitive, even outrageous. We tend to think of psychopathy as the province of criminals, with leadership qualities that may land someone atop a fringe religious cult, say – not in a boardroom. But before discussing the research, let’s consider for a moment why this possibility is actually less bizarre than it may initially seem.
The hallmarks of the psychopathic personality involve egocentric, grandiose behavior, completely lacking empathy and conscience. Additionally, psychopaths may be charismatic, charming, and adept at manipulating one-on-one interactions. In a corporation, one’s ability to advance is determined in large measure by a person’s ability to favorably impress his or her direct manager. Unfortunately, certain of these psychopathic qualities – in particular charm, charisma, grandiosity (which can be mistaken for vision or confidence) and the ability to “perform” convincingly in one-on-one settings – are also qualities that can help one get ahead in the business world.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#5361dfe14104
Just as in the earlier example I gave of social mimicry having the benefit that when another caveman ran away from a wild animal, signalling danger to the tribe, you get the social cue if you’re susceptible to body language and run away as well, whereas if you’re too autistic, you might not get the cue and get eaten – some humans that are called psychopaths have also evolved to take the role of the caveman signalling that there is a danger to the tribe, resulting in all the other cavemen running away and to then take all the resources from their cave and run away, psychopaths falsely signal danger to take advantage of others for their benefit.
Here the benefit would be with the autist again, being left to wonder how these normative lifeforms could be so stupid as to not notice what is going on, as the autist would be the only one left in the cave, able to recognize what the psychopath is doing. A wild animal never arrived, the psychopath simply took all the resources from the cave and ran away.
Adolf Hitler and his nazi comrades successfully studied the non-autistic condition:
So the answer to the question of why normative humans for instance believe in certain gods over others, or that certain animals can be tortured but others can’t, or certain ages of consent are correct but others aren’t, or certain drugs are bad because they’re drugs so they’re bad but other drugs are not drugs so they’re not bad, or certain parts of genitalia must be sliced but others not so much is because humans higher on the spectrum of psychopathy most likely set the trend for them to follow, because it’s a profitable niche to be working in, you can make a lot of money off of exploiting social pantomimes.
If they believe in god, you can make them pay for salvation on a piece of paper to not go to hell. If they believe in happy cows that are gladly made into milk machines, then they’ll pay you to factory farm these animals. If they believe that exactly 16 (or better 17, 18, as high as possible so that you, as a prison owner can make as much money as possible) is the right number, you can make money from arresting someone for having a partner under that holy age they believe to be holy. If they believe that certain drugs are innately dirty and associated with evil criminals, you can make money from arresting someone for taking said drugs. If they believe that certain parts of their children’s genitals are inherently diseased, you can make money from cutting said parts off of children’s genitals.
There is close to nothing that is insane enough for them to not believe in, it is a simple matter of repetition as Hitler already pointed out, this happens with youtube comments and memes all over the internet all the time.
That’s how moral panics (social trends where they believe something to be harmful that isn’t harmful, exaggerated risks of harm) or let’s also consider the opposite, let’s call it moral calms (social trends where they believe something to not be harmful that is actually harmful, normalized cruelty) are easily established.
Once something is repeated frequently enough and has been integrated into the society you as a psychopath are about to parasitize and form to your benefit, all that the non-autistics have to do is essentially to breed more children into it in order for them to start automatically mimicking the proposed model of behavior.
Counterintuitive conclusions 