http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070618124614.htm

Source: Cell Press
Date: June 19, 2007

Autistic Children Recognize Stereotypes Based On Race And Sex, Study
Suggests

Science Daily — Children with autism, who are unable to grasp the mental
states of others, can nonetheless identify with conventional stereotypes
based on a person's race and sex, researchers recently reported in Current
Biology.

"Even with their limited capacities for social interaction and their
apparent inability to orient to social stimuli, these autistic kids pick up
and endorse social stereotypes as readily as normally developing kids,"
said Lawrence Hirschfeld of the New School for Social Research in New York.
"One take-away point is that stereotypes are very easy to learn and very
robust. They don't require higher order attention, or apparently even
attention to social stimuli, to develop. Stereotypes can be learned even in
the face of damage to the 'social brain' and under extraordinarily
constrained conditions."

The profound inability of children with autism to engage in everyday social
interaction, as well as impairments in verbal and nonverbal communication,
had been attributed to a severe delay in "theory of mind" (ToM)
development--the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others
and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that
are different from one's own. If the use of stereotypes and mental states
were part and parcel of the same underlying cognitive process, then
autistic children would have similar difficulties with both.

In fact, the researchers found that autistic children who have a verbal age
between 6 and 7 years--and who fail ToM tasks--know and use gender and race
stereotypes just like normal children. Hirschfeld said he suspects the
stereotypes originate within subtle and seemingly incidental messages that
saturate the culture--for example, through advertising or biased attention
by the media. The kids might also learn about stereotypes from parental
behaviors, such as locking car doors when in certain neighborhoods, even if
parents carefully monitor what they say about race to their children.

Stereotypes are not inherently negative, he said. "We wouldn't be able to
think without social categories," he said. "Stereotypical roles are
important for navigating everyday interactions. Finding a plumber would be
difficult if we thought of people only as unique individuals. Getting
through the check-out line would be unwieldy if we didn't have simple
scripts about the roles that both shoppers and cashiers play."

The results suggest that different kinds of social reasoning occur through
independent mechanisms in all people. The autistic children's surprising
ability to recognize broad categories of people might also lead to new
methods for helping them improve their ability to function in society, he
said.

Caregivers today often attempt to teach children with autism ToM skills,
particularly techniques that make them more sensitive to other people's
mental states. Capitalizing on the kids' strengths in understanding social
categories might offer an alternative and easier learning method for
interpreting the behavior of others, one that doesn't involve "swimming
upstream," Hirschfeld said.

The researchers include Lawrence Hirschfeld of the New School for Social
Research in New York, NY; Elizabeth Bartmess of the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor, MI; Sarah White and Uta Frith of UCL Institute of Cognitive
Neuroscience in London, UK.

This work was supported by MRC programme grant 65013 to UF and a research
grant to LH and EB by the Culture and Cognition Program, University of
Michigan USA.

Reference: Hirschfeld et al.: "Can autistic children predict behavior by
social stereotypes?" Publishing in Current Biology, 19 June 2007, R451-452.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cell Press.