Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Access to the paper and basic setup

  • Several commenters share free links (institutional repositories, ResearchGate, Sci-Hub) and note it’s a short 2018 study based on an online SurveyMonkey survey (~400 people, ~100 self-reporting autism), recruited largely via social media.
  • Some emphasize it should be viewed as preliminary and hypothesis-generating rather than conclusive.

Is object personification uniquely autistic?

  • Many argue personifying objects is widespread and culturally “normal” (naming cars, ships, tools, appliances; children’s media like Toy Story and The Brave Little Toaster).
  • Others highlight the paper’s claim: object personification is common in everyone, but appears more frequent and persists later in life in autistic people.
  • One commenter initially misread “similar rates,” another quotes the paper showing higher and stronger rates in autism.

Empathy, autism, and objects

  • Multiple autistic commenters report intense empathy for objects, animals, or fictional non-humans, but muted or selective empathy for adults.
  • A key point: “empathy dysfunction” ≠ “lack of empathy.” Attributing feelings to inanimate objects can itself be framed as empathy misapplied, not absent.
  • Some describe autism as shifting or redistributing empathy (e.g., strong concern for neglected tools, houses, insects; flat response to adult human misfortune).

How personification is experienced

  • Examples: sadness at dull knives, flat tires, abandoned houses, neglected stuffed animals, broken toys, “unhappy” computers or operating systems.
  • Several distinguish between:
    • Normal irritation at a dull knife (aesthetic/functional judgment), vs.
    • Feeling emotional on behalf of the knife, experienced via the same mechanism as empathy for people.
  • For some, personification guides behavior: better care for “named” objects, reluctance to discard well-made items, “finding a good home” before disposal.

Cultural, linguistic, and philosophical frames

  • Animistic ideas (Shinto, tsukumogami, panpsychism) are invoked as alternative, non-pathologizing frameworks for these experiences.
  • A side discussion explores grammatical gender: whether languages that gender nouns affect how people “gender” personified objects, and how grammatical vs social gender differ.

Autism subtypes and broader cognition

  • One commenter proposes informal subtypes (dreamer/officious/ironic) and relates autism to a “schizophrenia axis,” prompting mention of predictive-coding theories where autism and schizophrenia might be opposite in terms of prediction vs sensory error weighting.
  • Others suggest autistic people may have a less dualistic subject–object boundary, making it more natural to treat objects and people under similar cognitive schemes.

Children, development, and diagnosis

  • Parents describe autistic children deeply concerned with bugs or toys, unsure what is “autism” vs typical childhood animism.
  • Another notes that seeing an idiosyncratic childhood trait later appear in autism research can feel validating, given earlier narrow diagnostic definitions.

Emotional costs and regulation

  • Some report distress or even meltdowns when personified objects are lost, moved, or damaged; decluttering is described as “torture” for this reason.
  • Others wonder if personification may sometimes be a strategy to externalize and structure hard-to-name emotions, but potentially increases anxiety when objects are harmed.

Methodological skepticism and psychology’s limits

  • Several criticize reliance on self-report surveys, social-media recruitment, vague response options, and small, non-random samples, tying this to psychology’s broader replication and “zombie social science” problems.
  • Others counter that while noisy, such work is a necessary early step toward richer, more rigorous studies.

Adjacent experiences: systems and software “feelings”

  • A cluster of commenters extend the idea to complex systems: “feeling” when software, infrastructure, or game states are “wrong” or “unhappy,” and using that internal sense to guide design and maintenance.
  • They note not everyone seems to have this kind of system-level emotional intuition, and speculate this might correlate with neurodivergence.