Controlled laboratory environments are great, don’t get me wrong. I hate the messy real world, with its confusing morass of different measurable and unmeasurable variables, just as much as the next researcher. I realize why we often want to take people away from that messy quagmire and into a nice room where we can shove them in front of a computer and show them pictures and stuff, while we track their eye gaze or while we have them push little…
Friendship Competition I’m a big fan of applying social science perspectives to autism. We spend so much time thinking about autism from the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, biology, psychiatry – but we rarely think about autism from perspectives like anthropology or political science. Fortunately, “rarely” doesn’t mean “never.” For example, in 2015, Elizabeth Fein published, in a psychological anthropology journal, a fascinating article about how societal changes that have increased the competitiveness of our social relationships might have affected the…