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 lives of autistic people.

Fein suggests that our society gives us more opportunities for choice in social affiliation than has historically been the case, and I think she’s absolutely right.  Many of us live in huge cities, with literally millions of other people around.  Nobody’s forcing us to be friends with any of them, nor is anyone forcing them to be friends with us.  We might have to put up with a work colleague we don’t like, but even there, the boss can fire an employee who doesn’t fit in with the workplace culture.  Even family ties are flexible in a world where people can easily move thousands of kilometres away from their place of birth.

Because nobody’s forcing anybody to be friends with anyone, people have to compete for friendship.  In this competitive world, those with good social skills get to have friends, because other people want to be friends with them.  Autistic people have social impairments that prevent us from competing as effectively, so we end up becoming isolated.  Furthermore, as we fail to secure friendships in this competitive world, we lose out on opportunities for social practice, making it harder for us to catch up.

Thus, autistic people do poorly in a competitive friendship environment.

However, for much of human history, people might have lived in smaller, rural communities.  There, they would be more or less stuck with the same network of acquaintances – many of whom would be family – for their entire lives.  I don’t doubt that those with better social skills would achieve higher social status in their communities, and that those with poorer social skills would have inferior social status, but it at least seems unlikely that autistic people would end up completely isolated, as it’s so easy for us to become today.  Thus, for autistic people in traditional societies, autism on its own (that is, in the absence of certain co-occurring conditions like intellectual disabilities) might not have been as disabling as it is in today’s world.

Fein even suggests that autistic people’s disadvantages in the friendship competition might explain some of the increases we are seeing in autism prevalence.  I’m quite certain that autism has always been a “thing,”[1] but it might not have been such a barrier in a society with less friendship competition, so there wouldn’t necessarily have been a need to identify it.  Could our society not only have more competitive friendship dynamics than most human societies have had throughout history and prehistory, but also more competitive dynamics today than it did in past decades?  It’s an intriguing thought.

Complexity, Predictability, and Sensory Overload

But friendship competition is not the only way in which the modern world can be more challenging for autistic people than other human societies.  An autistic anthropologist, Dawn Prince-Hughes (2004, p. 40), comments that, during her childhood:

“…I longed for simpler times when there was less noise, less color, fewer people, and less change.”

Prince-Hughes, like practically anyone born in North America during the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries, grew up in an era of complexity.  Ours is a crowded, busy, and bustling society.  It’s a huge, dynamic system, one with an incredible array of occupations and specializations.  As we move through the world, we become part of this system, interacting with innumerable other components of the system, which can in turn be affected by other components.  Because of the complexity of this system, unexpected things constantly happen: the only thing we can correctly predict, sometimes, is that unpredictable things will happen.

The modern world is also filled with sensory stimulation.  Traffic noise.  The din of crowds.  Bright, garish signs.  Need I go on?

I’m sure you can see that things would have been very different in the past.  I imagine that in peasant farming communities, life would have been (barring occasional disasters) simple, comparatively devoid of excessive sensory stimulation, and monotonously predictable.

It’s easy to see how increased complexity could have made it harder for autistic people to function in the world.  We crave predictability, and many of us have extremely impairing sensory sensitivities.  The modern world is, in many ways, a fundamentally hostile environment for autistic people.

Schools

Now, someone could object to a lot of what I’ve just said by pointing to the mainstream school.  Mainstream schools:

1. Are predictable environments, with clear structures and rules; and
2. Are environments in which children are assigned to classes with a predetermined and inflexible composition, sort of like traditional villages.

If we ignore the obvious fact that schools can be filled with distressing and overwhelming sensory stimuli, then, based on everything I’ve been saying, shouldn’t mainstream schools be a great environment for autistic people?  How, then, do we account for autistic people’s horrible school experiences?

I think there are important differences between being part of a temporary class of students selected on the basis of age and geographic proximity, and being part of a small, traditional community.  Students in school classes don’t have to plan on living alongside their peers decades into the future, so they’re free to engage in (sometimes cruel) social competition without having to worry about creating long-term enemies.  The fact that students in school classes are all more or less the same age is also significant, I think, because it leaves an unclear hierarchy that can encourage competition; in contrast, people in a community with everyone from small children to adults won’t have to be as competitive.[2]  There’s also the fact that children can learn norms and values from the society around them, and our society tells us that friendship is a personal choice.

Thus, schools are in a sense the worst of all possible worlds: an environment with competitive friendships, but no escape from the competition.  Students compete with one another for friends, and victimize and bully one another in the process, but it’s impossible for any to escape this competition, because students must continue to attend school and sit in their classes, whether they want to or not.

A Path Forwards

Fortunately, the adult world is not so restrictive as the mainstream school.  As Fein recognizes, and as many autistic adults have been saying for years, it is possible for autistic people to find alternative social spaces and associate with people more similar to ourselves.  These spaces can include communities of autistic adults, as well as groups organized on the basis of common interests.

It’s also possible to extend these spaces into childhood.  Fein, for example, describes a theatre summer camp for autistic teens.  Coincidentally enough, when I was an autistic teen, I attended a weekly theatre program for autistic teens for many years, and I had many positive experiences in that program.  If we wanted to go farther than these programs, we could even create more specialized schools for autistic children.

Thus, although the modern world has its challenges, it also brings important opportunities.  I’m certainly not trying to argue that we should go off and live in little, primitive rural communities!  On the contrary, I rather suspect that autistic people in traditional rural communities still occupied an inferior status in society, as I mentioned earlier.  However, if we stay to our current course, we can continue to create new social spaces for ourselves: spaces where we can be among others who appreciate us for who we are, and where we don’t have to feel inferior, while we continue to work to expand our participation in post-secondary education and employment.

 

Any thoughts?  Do you disagree with my admittedly rather speculative claims here?  Comment below!

Footnotes

[1] Insofar as we can call a heterogeneous, dimensional, mixed bag of behavioural phenotypes a “thing.”

[2] As an aside, I really think we need to think seriously about whether this idea of classes defined based on age/grade is a good thing.  I’m sure they make it easier to teach class content, but I’m seriously concerned that they negatively impact the social dynamics of the classroom.

References

Fein, E. (2015). “No one has to be your friend”: Asperger’s syndrome and the vicious cycle of social disorder in late modern identity markets. Ethos, 43(1), 82–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12073

Prince-Hughes, D. (2004). Songs of the gorilla nation: My journey through autism. New York: Three Rivers Press.