January 13, 2026

“Cognitive rigidity” and autistic people’s sense of justice

Posted in Uncategorized tagged Autism, Disability, Neurodiversity at 6:48 pm by chavisory

In the wake of the publication of his 2015 book NeuroTribes, author Steve Silberman frequently and memorably referred to a “strong sense of justice” as being so commonly noted among autistic people that it was “practically diagnostic.” In the years since, this observation (in which Silberman was not alone, but among its more prominent proponents) has transmuted into a conception of “justice sensitivity” as an inherent feature of autism itself, or as an innate character trait of autistic people.

I think there’s a lot to criticize in this idea of “justice sensitivity” as an inherent feature of autism rather than just common among autistic people, from the risks of portraying people of any neurology as inherently more moral, to the implication that autistic people are immune to prejudice or racism or incapable of acting unjustly ourselves.

However, I’m also becoming concerned with the narrative taking hold among some of the autistic community that says that autistic justice sensitivity is entirely a fabrication, or that it’s actually nothing more than a manifestation of our cognitive rigidity.

While I think it’s obviously a mistake to frame it as an essential feature or neurological trait of autism, I don’t think it’s either of those things, either, and in writing it off completely, I think we’re making the mistake of considering autistic people only collections of autistic traits, of neurological deficits, and not as people, who have personal histories, experiences, memories, characters, temperaments, values, feelings, or even the capacity for awareness of wrong done to ourselves and others.

I don’t believe “justice sensitivity” is an inherent trait of autism; I also don’t believe that it’s just our cognitive “rigidity.”

I think it’s one possible set of responses to our environments and experiences that we as humans are capable of having, one way in which our personal values can develop in response to our own histories and experiences and the way they interact with our predisposition to certain cognitive traits, personalities, and temperaments.

You know, like real people’s do.

And I suspect it’s one that we may be somewhat more likely to have than non-autistic people or people without some kind of history of marginalization, because of the ways our experiences differ from theirs from our earliest childhoods, and the interaction of these experiences with traits that are documented aspects of autism.

We’re subjected to absolutely rampant injustice compared to non-autistic children. We’re subjected to lower standards in healthcare and medical research. We can be deprived of our basic needs on the whim of an authority figure much more easily than non-autistic or non-disabled people can be. We’re often disbelieved about our most basic needs, our abilities and inabilities, our discomfort, our physical pain—to the point that one research study on pain reactivity in autistic vs. non-autistic children cautioned in its conclusion that “Clinical care practice and hypotheses regarding underlying mechanisms need to assume that children with autism are sensitive to pain.”

It has been considered perfectly acceptable to electric-shock autistic children into behavioral compliance within my adult lifetime, and while cities and states in the U.S. progressively ban conversion therapy on LGBTQ+ minors as ineffective and unacceptably damaging, effectively the same therapy developed by the same people is still considered the “gold standard” for treatment of autistic children.

We have feelings. We have empathy. “Strong pattern recognition” might be an oversimplification, but there is documentation of patterns of perceptual functioning in autistic people that are enhanced compared to those of non-autistic people in some respects, and other research has suggested we display more moral consistency across contexts, including in response to strangers and even when costly to ourselves. We’re also often noted for having longer and more detailed early memories, so we may well remember these experiences more vividly and with more specificity on average.

I also wonder about whether we might be less susceptible to just-world fallacies than non-autistic and non-disabled people on average. We have more reason to know that people in positions of social power or authority can do terrible things to you for no real reason than most people do.

Why would it be even a little bit surprising, given all this, that we might be particularly easily sensitized to witnessing injustice against others, on average?

I hate seeing other people mistreated just for being who they are, or just because someone else decided they could, because I know how that feels. I have since I was a tiny child. It is physically painful. I’m not capable of looking at rank injustice or abuse and just going “That’s fine,” or “That’s got nothing to do with me.”

This probably has to do with my experiences as an autistic person, as well as other things about me as a human in a complex interplay of reactions over time.

Almost just like a real person.

It’s not even like justice sensitivity only occurs among autistic people. Why does anyone become a civil rights activist, anyway? Lots of non-autistic people have looked at the injustice of the world and decided they could not simply tolerate it, whether they’re directly impacted or not. Why does anyone decide to work with or on behalf of a group of people they themselves don’t belong to? Why does anyone dedicate their life, or even give it, for the cause of justice?

Is it just their rigidity when a non-autistic person does it? Or is it a complex response to personal experiences, early perceptions of the world, having witnessed injury against someone they cared about, religious or spiritual convictions, the influence of role models, and other factors that all contribute to the formation of deep feelings about what justice requires?

I think there’s a serious danger in deciding that justice sensitivity in autistic people is “just our rigidity” of shoring up still-rampant prejudices that almost anything autistic people do is just a mechanistic imitation of non-autistic capabilities. (Non-autistic people have actual strengths, for instance, while we have splinter skills.) Where it’s fake whenever we do it. We could never genuinely identify with real people experiencing injustice. We don’t have real thoughts or feelings, because nothing that happens to us matters. We’re just walking embodiments of autistic deficits, after all, not conscious, complicated beings being affected by the things that happen to us in complex ways over time.

(///sarcasm)

I think we should critique the idea of autistic people as possessing some kind of essential superiority in moral perception, and that this is a topic that deserves more critical study; I think it could reveal a lot about autistic vs. non-autistic experiences of empathy, identification with those we perceive as different from ourselves, marginalization, ethical consistency, unpredictability, and social hierarchy. I’m curious about how culturally bound this phenomenon may be.

But there’s a real danger in setting up a standard in which autistic people’s powerful moral perceptions or identification with others can never be seen as meaningful or genuine, in which even our objection to our own dehumanization and mistreatment can never be considered credible, because that’s “just our rigidity.”

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