Here is why – Schizoids and Apserger’s both share a certain disregard for social norms, but people with Asperger’s don’t realise that what they’re doing is odd or wrong, while schizoids just generally don’t care. Also, people with Asperger’s tend to be withdrawn and/or content to be by themselves, but they are generally curious about others and do want to make friends. For some, the inability to do so causes considerable anxiety. Schizoids usually don’t see people by choice, not because they don’t know how to approach them.

As far as Asperger’s disappearing as a diagnosis and being blended with autism, I can’t see much of a problem with that. It has already been established that Asperger’s was part of the Autism spectrum, and quite similar to High-functioning Autism, only without cognitive or language development delays. We could say that people with Asperger’s have High-functioning Autism of the Asperger type or something like that.

Eve

I was under the impression that the sensory anomolies that have been associated with autism are hypersensitivity, along with hyposensitivity, and synaesthesia rather than standard hallucinations. So they typically are experiencing real sensations on a different scale or via a different sensory association rather than perception of non-existant phenomena delusional perceptions (or does synaesthesia count as the later even when the fact that you are tasting sound is understood?).

On trying to test for lies, yeah I have a hell of a time even with my own son figuring out when he’s intentfully lying and when we are just screwing up our communication, talking about different things. A lot of it is based on a repetoire of assumptions, that are only going hold for him, that we’ve built up over the years. A lot of them are context rather that direct “tells” from him. Even then it’s hit and miss and the assumptions have had to change over the years.

I will say he started lying relatively old. Although being late to talk would have some bearing on that, and relying more heavily on being downright stubborn to get what he wanted could have some bearing, too. :) Logically speaking, when you don’t much care about the other person’s opinion that’s going to significantly lower your motivation for lying. It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing. If you don’t understand that [successfully] lying can change their opinion then you aren’t going to do it, thus you don’t get much practice and experience in lying.

So there is just a whole lot of complexity to try tease anything meaningful out of, especially with limited exposure and history between the tester and the subjects.

Although it must be noted that impaired capacity does not mean reduced intent, these studies and others appear to indicate that people with autism have reduced capacities to understand when another is using deception, reduced skill in using deception, and indicate that the concept that deception can exist is more difficult for people with autism to grasp intellectually and intuitively.

I doubt if Dr Treg whatever his qualifications and background are could hack it as a serious researcher, and I really doubt if anyone would fund it being as the whole premise is so flawed.

It takes more than googling a few abstracts to put together a research proposal, one needs to be able to argue it coherently and come up with a tentative methodology at least.

So when you come to a fork in the road where on path leads to the village of the liars and the other leads to the village of truth tellers, and you meet a stranger how can you find which village he has come from by asking only one question?

BTW, there are a couple case-control studies on this. Oswald and Ollendick (1989) reported “impaired capacity” for deception. This was replicated by Baron-Cohen (1992).

One would have to find a way to account for this. In addition, using observation only to determine lying may also be problamatic, as some of the sign of lying (atypical eye-contact, fidgiting, playing with hands, stuttering and stammering, overly-asserting the story, changing the story etc) are also indicators of autism in some people (eye-contact, atypical body language, proprioceptive function and sensory issues, ‘odd’ prosody, verbal memory issues, echo/palilalia)

Institutionalisation is certainly a big factor to account for, if it can be accounted for at all. Someone who has learnt, for example, that saying ‘no’ to a request earns them some form of negative sanction (or that the person goes away) may be motivated to say ‘yes’ to a quesion even when the true answer is otherwise. A simplistic example I know, but hopefully you’ll have got the point.

Rigid application of social schema will have to be accounted for as well. One of the examples Atwood gives is of a boy who learnt to lie. Whereas typical children use lies to see what reaction they get, to avoid punishment, for malice, or for shits and giggles, this boy lied because he thought it was what he should have been doing because everyone else appeared to be doing it.

It’s interesting that we’ve somehow been directed to talk about ‘children with autism’, rather than the entire age-spectrum.

Although there do not appear to be statistically significant double-blind controlled clinical trials of lying in autism it does seem that such a trial could be worthwhile to answer the question:

I echo what Dedj said. I can see a lot of readers wondering where the “Dr.” in “Dr. Treg” comes from in light of the above.

Double-blind trials are appropriate when you want to evaluate treatments. If you want to determine if there are differences between autistics and non-autistics, the appropriate design is a case-control study. In a case-control study you can match groups for certain variables, like IQ, to make sure you’re not studying a separate construct (like intellectual disability) by proxy. There can be blinding in case-control studies, to control for observer bias, but this doesn’t make the case-control study a clinical trial or anything of the sort.

An even better design (prohibitively expensive perhaps) is to do a whole population prevalence study of ASD with good case-finding, and then evaluate the autistics located by the study. This way you don’t have a whole lot of selection bias. The NHS study is an example of this.

That children and teenagers lie is not under contention. That lying in children and teenagers with autism would therefore be expected is not under contention. That atypical lying in chidren and teenagers with autism is so frequent and intense as to constitute a clinical feature is under contention.

There is some pretty flawed Socrates is a cat logic here (Socrates are you a cat?)

Politicians lie all the time, does that make them autistic?

So do Dr’s particularly when prescribing placebos or other ineffective treatments.

ALL fiction writers, dramatists and story tellers lie. (and that is called culture)

The liars paradox of course forbids you to own up to your own creativity here, otherwise we might have to accept that on occasion you can tell the truth.

I am Santa Claus, there you see I have just told a lie, easy wasn’t it, will you add me to your evidence now?

I do not think you know anything about the semantic and pragmatic problems in autism at all, which underlie the difficulty that autistic people have in carrying off a lie, or of using falsehood as part of normative social activity (false praise, flattery for instance) a lie to be effective has social dimensions beyond simple falsehood itself it involves a considerable degree of social understanding to be effective, simple denial of something obvious (“did you have a bath this morning” – “no”) is not a lie in the same sence at all.

You should be into linguistics perhaps you might begin to grasp the nuances of these things.

I seriously am trying to figure out if you add anything to the discussion. I don’t mind opposing points of view. But, in general, your statements are devoid of real content and very troll-like in nature.

This latest round is worse than usual. You respond to the statement, “A couple testimonials of autistic people who have been known to (gasp) lie is your evidence of an association of dishonesty with autism?” with more testimonials.

I read a lot of lies on the internet. Some I discuss here. Many involve autism parents lying. I do not make a claim that there is an association between autism parents and lying.

I see no point in approving further comments in this discussion.