# Limits of folk psychology
Folk psychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology) helps us in everyday life a lot. It's a useful heuristic. It allows us to reason about ourselves, about other people and our relationships to them. It successfully takes us through maybe 90% of life circumstances. But then it tends to shows its ugly face. It sometimes leads us to dark swamps and we get stuck. Some earlier, some later, lucky (or naive?) ones who avoid the murky waters completely. It seems to be a function of how screwed up we emerge from our childhoods (thanks parents!) and the amount of life experience we collect over time. And it is the discipline of real expert psychology which then leads the way out of the swamps of misery back to sunny beaches and green islands. And some manage, though some remain in the swamp for too long causing them a lot suffering and again some remain there unhappy for the rest of their days. Perhaps one of the long-term goals of navigating life is to attempt not to end up in that last group.
Now, imagine how difficult it is to have Autism Spectrum Disorder and being clumsy at understanding people.
@FailForward
Nah, this is why I point it out.
If ASD people found a way to understand people objectively, they would be even more socially awkward and withdrawn because they would be stuck in "paralysis by analysis".
Like the saying "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, then we would be so simple that we couldn't".
Well, the human brain, and the infinite spectrum of human behaviour, is definitely not so simple that an ASD person can hope to understand people in real time, with a mental algorithm/heuristic "bot" running in the background in their mind.
I know. I've tried.
I've studied The Enneagram.
I've studied Motivation Theory.
I've studied Persuasion Psychology.
I've studied Eastern Religious Philosophy.
People are still a mystery to me.
I STILL can't predict what NT people will do next.
Although - I can say this with absolute confidence: Neuro-Typical people (NT's) are oblivious, unaware of their heuristics. They go around all the time making snap judgements of other people and they are ignorant that they are even doing it.
But me, being ASD & thus disconnected, I can objectively observe them and see it clearly.
Often, it's because I'm the one being judged.
Cheers 🙂
@soundwave Look at it positively. That rational attitude gives you direct access to the real expert psychology right away ("things are like this..."), without the distraction of folk psychology foolishness ("I think that you think that I think...") everybody around needs to deal with. Maybe for such people life can actually be somewhat easier in some aspects of it- me speculating only.