Portia Iversen challenges the assumption that autistic individuals are not interested in socializing.

So there are some other misconceptions about autism that we still have today. One of them, the biggest one I think of all, and really it holds up all the rest of science. is the idea that if someone does not exhibit social behavior, it means that they don’t have the desire to be social or with people. So in other words, we have to be very careful about using our cultural filters about what a behavior means to interpret it. Because if we think that autism is mainly a problem of the social brain (which it is), if a child doesn’t make eye contact, if we make the assumption that this means that they are not interested in people, and we’re wrong, we could go down wrong scientific roads for years (and we have) looking for the causes for their lack of desire for social connection, when it might be fully intact and their ability to express it might be what is broken.

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