Object personification in autism

Ajouté : 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]I was interested in finding out more about how autistic people might use object personification. And I do this.

[00:00:07]This is Biscuits. He is my emotional support otter. He was given to me by my boyfriend when my mom had um cancer. And Biscuits sits with me when I work and he likes to go to the zoo with me and he loves to go to Chicago. So I found this really cool study and honestly there's really nothing wrong with it. But I thought I'd do something different. I found this critique by this researcher on this paper. And this researcher is autistic, so it kind of offers this different perspective. So the original study looked at whether autistic people are more likely to give human traits to objects, so like stuffed animals or toys or everyday objects. And more autistic participants reported personifying objects compared to non-autistic participants. And they also did it more frequently. Now the researchers in the original paper suggested explanations for this like loneliness or coping with social disconnection, reducing anxiety, making the world feel more predictable.

[00:01:07]So essentially they framed it as a kind of psychological function or coping response. But the researcher's critique thinks that this framing may be too deficit-based because it assumes that if autistic people form strong emotional connections with objects, there must be something missing socially that needs explaining. And the critique pushes back on that. Instead of automatically interpreting object personification as compensation for loneliness or social difficulty, they ask, "What if this is just a different way of experiencing attachment and meaning?" You know, for many people these aren't just objects.

[00:01:43]And I've seen people do this with their pets, too. They're a source of comfort, stability, emotional regulation, sometimes even companionship. So the critique isn't saying that the original data is wrong. It's just saying that the interpretation might be limited by a neurotypical lens. One that tends to default to deficit explanations for autistic behavior. And that matters because how we frame findings shapes how we understand autistic experiences.

[00:02:10]So, ultimately the takeaway from her critique isn't that autistic people personify objects more, it's more like we need to be careful about turning difference into deficit when the lived experience might actually be meaningful and not pathological.