Statistically, autistic people are easy marks

Predators preferentially identify and take advantage of autistic people because we lack the ability to read red flags

By Tashi Lonchay - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The conclusion that autistic people, or people with autistic traits (neurodivergencies), are vulnerable to manipulation is not new . Authors who espouse the Theory of Mind perspective will call that “mind blindness”, a condition of cognitive empathy deficit that makes it particularly difficult for autistic individuals to “spot a liar”. My objective with this issue of the newsletter is not review these theories and concepts. Neither it is to expose and comment on the lack of consensus as to what empathy is, as we seem to employ over 40 different conceptualizations of this phenomenon. The fascinating point here is that, regardless of the author’s theoretical affiliation, most agree that “these people” - autistic people, or people with neurodivergencies that specifically affect their ability to communicate in the convoluted manner of those that don’t share our neurological makeup -  are vulnerable to manipulation, to malice, and to gaslighting. In my words, we are “easy marks” (these are important articles with comparative evidence about communication difficulty or ease between autistics, between non-autistics, and between hybrid diads: Morrison et al 2019, and Crompton et al 2020).

The answer to the many questions that have been posed to me by my readers as whether this can be avoided with a manual or guidelines is a solid “no”. Not in my experience, not seeking consistency with the available models. No algorithm can be so precise as to protect us from predators. The reason is simple: our brains are complementary opposites. We are known as “moral truth tellers” and they are professional “immoral deceivers”.

And who are they? Anyone and everyone. They are the plumbing company that you hire, and they look so trustworthy, they are the colleague that wants to “pick your brain”, they are the “friend” that has an amazing partnership idea, they are the lawyer that you hire for some very painful legal action. In each case, you are duped or worse. The lawyer may present you an astronomical bill for services not included in their contract with you, and if you don’t hire someone as good as them to defend you, and lose tens of thousands of dollars, you will lose everything. There are too many cases of people who lost everything they owned to unscrupulous lawyers. Partnerships are a classic in the con and scam world. I learned that when I shared my experiences of being literally robbed by partners. At least 75% of the people I told my case to have an identical situation to share, whether they were the victim or it was someone they knew.

No, we are absolutely not alone in being vulnerable to conmen and criminals. Everyone is. The difference is, first, quantitative: we are more vulnerable than those who don’t share this particular neurodivergence (whether they are autistic or not). The second is qualitative: we have less tools to recover from the damage caused by the con, from the first gaslighting to dealing with loss – financial loss, loss of trust, loss of meaning, loss of hope.

These differences are associated with abilities that those neurotypical for this trait have. They can “read” liars better and more frequently than we do. Reading and defending ourselves from predators don’t depend exclusively on those abilities (otherwise neurotypical folks wouldn’t be victimized, and they are, by the millions). It is also associated with the level of transparency of the liar. From the extreme of the completely opaque liar – the dangerous conman who can trick everyone, some Keyser Söze or Roy Courtnay – to the completely transparent liar, there is a gradient of transparency and, consequently, of harder or easier con detection.

But there is another reason why we are poor con detectors, and also poor mourners of the losses imposed on us by them. Apparently, a peculiar relation with the value of truth is more frequent among neurodivergent people. Whether this is a response to the humiliation of frequent victimizations or an inherent trait, we tend to believe – more frequently than neurotypical individuals – that truth is an absolute value. We tend to side with the claim that truth telling is critical for a fair society. And we are not wrong, are we?

Back to the questions from my readers, it’s impossible to design an algorithm for “predator protection” because an algorithm is a logical construct, and predators rely on infinitely more sophisticated decision-making and behavioral systems. They can read us like good con detectors can read them. But they can also read exactly what kind of blindness we have. I don’t mean that as an endorsement of the Theory of Mind arguments. It is an argument that we all have different types and levels of blindness as to reality and to “the other”. Ours is a peculiar form of blindness, one that would probably not be something to talk about in a society that didn’t systematically reward dishonesty, lying, deceiving and winning at any cost, not to mention promoting a distorted notion of success based on the value of wealth and fame. With this, there is a myriad of “motivational” discourses about the value of “hustling” (and that does include stepping on every “weak” guy in your path), of making “good choices”, since success would be all about good personal choices, and the alleged “weak” would be incapable of making them.

I’ve lived in different countries, the longest times in the US and in Brazil. The frequency of external attacks from corporations, smaller businesses and individuals seeking to take illicit advantage of me is about one order of magnitude greater in the US. Brazil is not known to value honesty. In fact, it has memorialized the beloved Brazilian stereotype of the “malandro”, which can be roughly translated as the small-time crook. Therefore, the problem is not how dishonesty versus honesty are depicted in that particular culture. It’s how individualism is promoted to an ontological status much higher than collective action, where all choices and paths are reduced to individual decision-making, making the social construction of choices, thoughts, skills and ideology opaque to all. Individualism, the self-made-man myth, the value of individual prosperity are the actual sources of the armies of dishonest predators. Not some neurological disorder that makes them inherently malignant.

They may be gifted in “reading” the other. That gift could make them the compassionate physicians with doctors without borders, leaders among homeless people or animal shelter volunteers. Ironically, they would probably meet us there, because our abilities, too, lead us that way. Instead, we are paired to be predator and victim, conman and gullible mark.

Does it get better? Even if an algorithm is impossible: can we get any wiser with respect to predators? Not in my experience. I am almost 60 years old and the rate at which I am targeted by conmen, ordinary crooks and malignant psychopaths is exactly the same as 30, 20 or 10 years ago. More so in the US, less in Brazil, but the rate is constant in each country.

Exactly all my business partners in projects involving a more significant investment stole from me. That went from money in the account, expensive equipment that they admitted they took and sold, but then had no money to pay me back (and the lawsuit gets tossed), to stealing intellectual property and using my name. There were innumerable small cases in which I did the service but was never paid, plagiarism and the stealing of small items. I calculated my losses in a couple of million dollars, in a lifetime. I don’t make a lot of money, I’m just an autistic scientist, so this means most of the wealth generated by me and not retained by corporations was stolen by delinquents.

Some cases were more dangerous, though.

In 2009, my lawyer and friends involved a forensic psychiatrist in a police effort to stop an obsessive harassing psychopath (their diagnosis, not mine, it's a forensic term) who was attacking me and putting my life in danger. We never fully understood what he wanted. He was a smart guy, but probably too far gone into some alternative reality that none of us understood. He claimed to be the avatar of Jesus Christ (I had no idea what that meant, being a second-generation atheist), that he had been in tunnels under the Himalayas where he saw aliens, and Jesus himself in suspended animation. Also, he alleged he was a powerful Candomblé entity. Did he believe all that crazy stuff? I don’t know. I did observe him lying in a way that fascinated me because everyone believed him. At first, he claimed that he wanted me, that he had found out that his calling was to “create” me. Scary. Creepy. Time to take safe distance. And that’s when he went ballistic. He described in gruesome detail how he was going to destroy me. That was just the beginning: he wrote to everyone he could identify from my personal and professional life, spreading lies about me. It didn’t work: those people realized that a deranged guy was writing some pretty scary things, and they closed ranks around me. We got a lawyer, registered a couple of police reports, and hired this forensic psychiatrist.

I saw this doctor a couple of times during the defense actions and after the so-called psychopath was silenced, a big relief.

First, the psychiatrist told me that I should not reduce my public presence or refrain from public interaction, especially online, since he was monitoring me 24/7. According to him, they get emboldened if the victim withdraws and then they become much more dangerous. His advice to me was to publish as much as I could, as visibly as I could, and interact as little as possible with strangers in comments. Make a point of making my privacy boundaries ironclad.

That didn’t make too much sense at first. Wouldn’t exposing myself that way push him even farther? According to the doctor, no. They, too, follow somewhat rigid schemes of action. In this case, it was outcome rigidity. They need evidence that their intimidation is working. If you provide evidence that it is not, at first, they are confused but eventually they move on to the next target. That was disturbing: my freedom from that predator necessarily meant some other woman out there would be victimized. The doctor confirmed.

He also told me that, given his extensive experience with these malignant perpetrators, I would be targeted forever. That there was something about me that attracted them, that angered them, that disturbed them and made me an irresistible target. When I asked why, he said it was the 6-million-dollar question. All victims want to know that, but it's just some combination of symbolic elements that triggers that behavior. I still have no clue. I suppose my neurodivergence is determinant, though.

According to that psychiatrist, they don't kill their victims. Their ultimate goal is to obliterate the victim's symbolic existence, destroy their livelihood, isolate them, until they kill themselves. In this sense, people with a history of abuse are extremely attractive to them. People with a history of suicide attempts, much more.

The vague nature of the explanations or, worse, their absence, was disturbing. He admitted that there was very little empirical evidence about these behaviors especially because these people don’t suffer with their damaging behaviors. That made sense: we seek a psychiatrist or a therapist because we are in mental suffering. Nobody seeks a therapist to share how excited and satisfied they are for having bullied someone, killed a couple of people, or stolen thousands of dollars from an elderly couple. The little we know about them, through their own accounts, was obtained in prison settings, not the best environment to obtain good quality data.

He must have a point, though. They keep coming and coming. Dozens of them every month, most small, some I should probably keep an eye on, a few extremely dangerous. I live in the US, but I still have important institutional issues to take care of in Brazil, like my Dad’s inheritance lawsuit. In that case, everything was made more difficult with my older siblings’ attempt to get me to surrender all my inheritance to the “will-bearer”, the sibling who never liked my Dad. Thanks to them, I now have ample opportunities to be targeted by predators.

With at least five of these attacks by criminals I became suicidal. It was not because of the financial loss itself, or being publicly defamed, or because of the threats and intimidation. It was something else. Something got broken in the fabric of reality itself. The obvious reward that dishonesty, abuse and violation of all possible boundaries were getting became incompatible with my self-justification. If this is what social life it, then I don’t with to take part in it anymore. In a sense, these delinquents had the power of creating absolutes in my perceptive universe where before I had nuance and gradients.

It seems that we have a particular relationship with truth and its value, different from those who don’t share this particular communication neurodivergence. From a Kantian perspective, we are good and we are on the right side of the civilizatory picture. From a practical perspective, we are at risk. Whether at risk of having our livelihoods destroyed beyond repair, or at risk of having our representations of reality and society pushed to the barbarianism irreversibility end of the spectrum, the risk is life-threatening.

It made me think about the much higher rate of suicide among autistic adults as compared to non-autistic people of the same demographic. How many of us were induced to suicide? How many of us were pushed to the limit of mental suffering by the intervention of malignant predators?

I say we need to start collecting accounts about this. We need to see them as social actors central to the social pathology that produces suicides. I think we need to put a spotlight over the people who take advantage of neurodivergent individuals. Malignant manipulators who "see through" our gullible nature and prey on us. I say we are being murdered by suicide by these people.

If there is genuine willingness to look into this, we can make a case for suicide inducement. It doesn’t matter if they are taken to Court and locked up. It doesn’t even matter if we can disclose their names. It matters if we can show society that they exist, and that they preferentially prey over us.

It is time abusers are charged with suicide inducement. It will probably lead nowhere, but it's a start. It will shed a light on this taboo issue.