J.P. Grodniewicz and Anna Urbanek
Affiliation: Jagiellonian University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: autistic masking, mindshaping, self-understanding, self-knowledge, neurodivergence
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Self-Knowledge
Autistic people often hide or alter their behavior in order to meet societal expectations and fit in—a phenomenon known as masking (Hull et al., 2017; Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019; Cook et al., 2022). Masking has important benefits for neurodivergent individuals, from increasing social acceptance to enhancing their career opportunities and ability to navigate social hierarchies. But it also comes with significant costs. It often leads to mental and emotional exhaustion, increased anxiety, delayed or missed diagnosis, or even suicidal ideation (Hull et al., 2021; Lorenz & Hull, 2024; Miller et al., 2021; Petrolini et al., 2023; Sedgewick et al., 2021).
In this paper, we focus on a relatively underexplored cost of masking, namely, its negative impact on subjects' self-understanding. The paper consists of four parts.
In the first part, we appeal to the "mindshaping" view of folk psychology (Mameli, 2001; McGeer, 1996, 2007, 2015; Zawidzki, 2013, 2018), which suggests that our thoughts, behaviors, and mental states are shaped by the social norms and expectations to which we are exposed. We argue that masking can be conceptualized as a natural reaction of neurodivergent individuals to excessive neurotypical mindshaping—a concept we borrow from Strijbos and De Bruin (forthcoming).
This view, rooted in the "neurodiversity approach" (Jaarsma & Welin, 2012; Walker, 2014; Kapp, 2020; Dwyer, 2022; Pellicano & Houting, 2022; R. Chapman, 2023; Botha et al., 2024), contrasts both with traditional views conceptualizing social cognition in autism exclusively in terms of mindreading deficits (Frith & Happé, 1999), and with earlier mindshaping views of autism, such as the one developed by Victoria McGeer (2001, 2004, 2005, 2009), according to which autistic individuals are not receptive to mindshaping due to their "sensory disturbances" (McGeer, 2001, p. 128).
In the second part, we examine a number of testimonials from autistic individuals included in qualitative studies on autism (e.g., Hull et al., 2017; Seers & Hogg, 2023a; Miller et al., 2021). We argue that these testimonials illustrate that masking often gives rise to a particularly severe form of self-ambiguity, i.e., a failure to demarcate and differentiate oneself from something one does not consider identical to or part of oneself, yet which strongly affects one's identity.
Other examples of self-ambiguity discussed in the literature focus on such sources of ambiguity as social pressures, upbringing, work stress, physiological abnormalities, and, most notably, illness (Dings & De Bruin, 2022; Dings & Glas, 2020).
We argue that many autistic individuals who mask struggle with the ambiguity between their autistic self and a mask they have to put on in a predominantly neurotypical word. We call this phenomenon "self-mask ambiguity."
In the third part, we discuss ways in which masking and self-mask ambiguity diminish individuals' self-understanding. In this discussion we rely on a particular characterization of self-understanding developed by one of the authors in earlier works. According to this characterization self-understanding is a kind of "objectual understanding"—i.e., a holistic understanding of a subject domain (Zagzebski, 2001; Kvanvig, 2003; Riggs, 2009). More specifically, having (some degree) of objectual understanding of oneself, involves possessing a large amount of information about one's past and present mental states, bodily sensations, life events and so on, as well as grasping how they relate to each other (AUTHOR_1, AUTHOR_2).
This notion of self-understanding is related to, but not identical with, the notion of self-concept commonly used in psychology, including in the context of research on autism (see, e.g., Lind, 2010; Robinson et al., 2017). For example, Lind (2010), following Neisser (1988), characterizes self-concept as "a set of beliefs about the self (e.g. I have brown hair, I am a child, I am silly, etc.)" (p. 432). Self-concept is commonly defined as the totality of information one has about oneself (Morin, 2017). Self-understanding, by contrast, is an epistemic achievement that consists of grasping the coherence-making relations between the pieces of information contained within one's self-concept.
This characterization allows us to think about self-understanding as both gradable and multidimensional. The three dimensions of self-understanding are: (i) richness, reflecting the amount and scope of information we have about ourselves, (ii) factivity, reflecting the ratio of true-to-false information we take into account, and (iii) coherence, reflecting how well we recognize the relations between the pieces of information.
In the second part of this section, we discuss how masking and self-mask ambiguity can diminish self-understanding of masking autistics along all these dimensions by making it difficult for them to acquire a broad range (richness) of accurate information about themselves (factivity), and to build a coherent picture of themselves based on this information (coherence).
In the fourth and final part of the paper, we discuss how and to what extent an autism diagnosis and subsequent unmasking can lead to a deepening of one's self-understanding (Tan, 2018). Once again drawing from reports of autistic individuals talking about their diagnosis, we argue that, equipped with concepts of neurodiversity, autism, and masking, they often begin deepening their self-understanding by acquiring more true information about themselves (thereby increasing the richness and factivity of their self-understanding). They achieve this by educating themselves, learning from and interacting with the autistic community, seeking feedback from trusted others, and seeking a safe context for engaging in self-experimentation and self-exploration through practicing unmasking (L. Chapman et al., 2022; R. Chapman & Carel, 2022; Neff & Casale, 2023; Price, 2022; Seers & Hogg, 2023b).
Finally, their self-understanding often becomes more coherent as they become less torn between their autistic- and masked-self and come to see masking for what it is—a survival strategy they have adopted for navigating a challenging and often hostile environment.
The whole discussion motivates our conclusion that, while supporting autistic individuals, we must think carefully about how to help them tackle the specific challenges involved in nurturing and deepening their self-understanding.
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