Defining Altruism Issue

In current society, it can be justified that the level of autonomy directly influences the amount of altruism an autistic adolescent implements.

Defining Altruism:

When it comes to the comprehension of socialization within the development of behaviors in adolescents, altruism is vital. Although there is no true altruism, more or less altruism can be determined based upon the involuntary actions and behaviors of an individual. In the absence of motivation, altruism cannot transpire. An altruist must have the inherent belief that the action being carried through is in their best self-interest, benefiting them continuously.

More than just promoting others candidly is required to induce motivation for definite contribution. In addition to altruistic concern, the choice to act for the betterment of someone else requires such an altruist to believe that helping is in their own best interest. “If an altruist can obtain benefits from improving another’s welfare that is not outweighed by personal costs, it is in the altruist’s interest to help and they will tend to do so” (Dovidio et al., 1991).

Having the need to develop the welfare of one means that the altruist derives pleasure from the advancements of another’s welfare and will continuously be displeased by the absence of such improvements (Batson & Weeks, 1996). Altruism alone cannot motivate caring if the help implies insufficient or counter-productive satisfaction for the intention of advancing others’ welfare (Sibicky et al., 1995). Also, satisfying one altruistic motive often leads to the dissatisfaction of another. Altruism can be promoted by fostering any seemingly non-correlated beliefs. Particularly, telling people there is no such thing as altruism is an example. Instead, altruism should be pronounced as common and expected. Individuals feel uplifted when they witness altruism (Haidt & Algoe, 2004) and they tend to become more altruistic themselves as a result (Yates, 1999). If the goal is to promote altruism, providing as many attractive altruistic role models as possible in social media and in personal lives is the way to go. Rewarding attempted altruism, or at least celebrating those who attempt to be altruistic, is a practice that should become second nature if the goal is to promote as much altruistic behavior as possible. The behavior carried out is to sustain another without anticipation of deserving a reward.

Usually, the intention behind an action often determines its moral value. This is the thought of there being no true altruism, but this is not a reason to disregard altruism altogether.

Altruism in Child Development:

It is a common understanding in child development that children tend to imitate characteristics they find interesting. Yarrow et al (1970) promote the idea that children learn from and imitate others around them with warm and friendly tones rather than cold and distant tones. Yarrow et al (1970) showed that children learn altruistic behavior.

Child Altruism & Egocentrism:

The investigation of the development of skills such as role-taking and their relation to significant changes in social behavior is crucial.
Children reaching a socio-centric development level behave more altruistically in a natural environment than their cognitively more egocentric peers (autism in natural society).

Defining Autism (differences) – To define an adolescent on the autistic spectrum, an understanding of the differences between an average adolescent and an adolescent with autism must be reached. The disconnect between typical and autistic adolescents’ relations and interactions becomes more apparent over time. The development of a typical adolescent includes learning that others have minds like their own. This contrasts with a developing autistic adolescent who perceives the minds of others as unknown.

An adolescent on the autistic spectrum sees the cognitive minds of typical adolescents as peculiar. A detachment is seen between the typical and the autistic adolescents. This doesn’t suggest that either is broken in some way but illustrates the significant differences between them; one is unable to understand the other. Both execute their life’s journey and cross the finish line, yet the process leading up to the arrival is unknown and unjustified.

There are specifics relating to the process of autistic adolescents that lead most to the idea that having autism in the societies of our current world induces a mentality that views an autistic adolescent as broken. Individuals with autism do not lack the ability to understand another’s mental processes, only those non-correlated with themselves. Non-autistic individuals are similar; they do not understand autistic individuals but can understand those compatible with themselves.

Consider yourself attempting to understand someone of the opposite sex. It may seem impossible for most individuals to understand the workings of the opposite sex’s mind, but the understanding between you and someone of the same sex is completely coherent. Therefore, because there is a misunderstanding with someone of the opposite sex, it doesn’t reduce the misunderstanding to them being broken or missing something essential.

The same consideration arises when addressing the incomplete connection between autistic and non-autistic individuals.

Autism in Child Development – Section 2 Claim 1: The autonomy of adolescents with autism directly correlates with the social environment in which they are raised.

Autonomy in Autism – Effects of Environment Ignoring Traits of Autism – Section 3 Counterclaim 1: The independence of an adolescent with autism cannot be determined or developed environmentally, and therefore cannot correlate with their level of altruism.

Section 4 Claim 2: The more independent an autistic adolescent is, the less altruistic they are.

Hamilton et al Key Study & Critical Thinking – Hamilton’s study suggested that a deficit in mirror neuron systems might contribute to poor imitation performance in children with autistic spectrum disorders, and might be a cause of poor social abilities in these children. To test this hypothesis, the performance of 25 children with ASD and 31 typical children of the same verbal mental age were examined on four action representation tasks and a theory of mind battery.
Both typical and autistic children had the same tendency to imitate an adult’s goals, to imitate in a mirror fashion, and to imitate grasps in a motor planning task. Children with ASD showed a superior performance on a gesture recognition task. These imitation and gesture recognition tasks all rely on the mirror neuron system in typical adults, but performance was not impaired in children with ASD. However, the ASD group was impaired on the theory of mind tasks. These results provide clear evidence against a general imitation impairment and a global mirror neuron system deficit in children with autism. Consequently, this data can best be understood in terms of multiple brain systems for different types of imitation and action understanding; the ability to understand and imitate the goals of hand actions is intact in children with ASD.

Both typical and autistic children had the same tendency to imitate an adult’s goals, to imitate in a mirror fashion, and to imitate grasps in a motor planning task. Children with ASD showed superior performance on a gesture recognition task. These imitation and gesture recognition tasks all rely on the mirror neuron system in typical adults, but performance was not impaired in children with ASD. Nonetheless, the ASD group was impaired on the theory of mind tasks. These results provide clear evidence against a general imitation impairment and a global mirror neuron system deficit in children with autism. This data can best be understood in terms of multiple brain systems for different types of imitation and action understanding. The ability to understand and imitate the goals of hand actions is intact in children with ASD (Hamilton et al).

The results of the experiments described in the Hamilton et al. study suggest that autistics can imitate in certain contexts, but the ability to imitate in particular ways does not necessarily correlate with the ability to infer mental or emotional states. The experiments did not, in fact, test for “automatic mimicry or emotional imitation abilities” (Hamilton et al). Instead, they tested for directed imitation of mechanical movements. Hamilton’s study did not address issues of empathy, nor did it provide detailed explanations for poor autistic performance on the Theory of Mind tasks. It has been referenced here because the findings suggest that theories attributing all manifestations of the autistic difference to mirror neuron “dysfunction” are oversimplifications.

According to Marco Iacoboni, “Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person’s mental shoes. In fact, with mirror neurons, we do not have to pretend; we practically are in another person’s mind” (Iacoboni). “Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been implicated in a broad range of phenomena, including certain mental disorders” (Ker Than, LiveScience, April 2005). Thus, mirror neurons may help cognitive scientists explain how children develop a theory of mind, which is a child’s understanding that others have minds similar to their own.
Doing so may help shed light on autism, in which this type of understanding is often missing.

Empathy (Jim Sinclair)- “Empathy” is a nebulous term often used to mean the projection of one’s own feelings onto others. Therefore, it is much easier to “empathize” with (i.e., understand the feelings of) someone whose ways of experiencing the world are similar to one’s own than to understand someone whose perceptions are very different. “If empathy means being able to understand a perspective that is different from one’s own, then it is not possible to determine how much empathy is present between persons without first having an adequate understanding of each person’s perspective and how different those perspectives are from each other” (Jim Sinclair). “People tend to assume that others’ minds work similarly to their own, which differs from having an ability to simulate and understand another person’s state of mind without explicit information about it” (Jim Sinclair).

Empathy and Altruism- “As people mature, they can use an increasingly sophisticated set of processes to help them understand other people’s subjective experiences. Although important differences between such processes exist, ’empathy’ is often used as an umbrella term for them. The greater people’s ability to empathize, the greater their potential to be altruistic”.

“Social skills training that improves people’s empathizing abilities (Stepien & Baernstein, 2006) therefore also tend to improve their ability to be altruistic.”

“Empathy allows individuals to appreciate the world from someone else’s point of view. If empathizers identify with those they empathize with, they are likely to become sympathetic” (Häkansson & Montgomery, 2003).

The more independent an adolescent is, the less connected they are to empathize or sympathize. Moral concerns tend to prescribe caring about the welfare of others, which can also lead to altruism (Carlo et al., 1996).

Morality-inspired altruism is more often paternalistic than sympathy-inspired altruism. Empathy promotes altruism mainly because empathy promotes sympathetic or other-regarding moral concerns.

Section 5 Counterclaim 2- Independence does not correlate with empathy/sympathy levels.

Key Study- UC San Diego, Autism Linked To Mirror Neuron Dysfunction: The UC San Diego team aimed to investigate the relationship between individuals with autism and dysfunctional mirror neuron systems contribution to the impairments of autism. The researchers collected EEG data from 10 high-functioning males with autism spectrum disorders and 10 age- and gender-matched control subjects. Mu rhythm, a human brain-wave pattern, is suppressed or blocked when the brain is engaged in doing, seeing, or imagining action, and it correlates with the activity of the mirror neuron system. In most people, the mu wave is suppressed in response to both their own movement and the observation of others moving. Subjects were tested while they moved their own hands and while they watched videos of visual white noise (baseline), of bouncing balls (non-biologic motion), and of a moving hand.
As expected, mu wave suppression was recorded in the control subjects both when they moved and when they watched another human move. In other words, their mirror neuron systems acted normally. The mirror neurons of the subjects with autism spectrum disorders, however, responded anomalously, only to their own movement. The findings provide evidence that individuals with autism have a dysfunctional mirror neuron system, which may contribute to many of their impairments, especially those that involve comprehending and responding appropriately to others’ behavior. Though this does not actually prove that autistic brains are “dysfunctional” to begin with, it merely demonstrates an observation of the difference in functionality between autistic and nonautistic cognition. Any attempt to explain why mu waves might not be suppressed in autistic subjects when they viewed the moving hand would state that the autistic subjects were simply processing the data in their environment differently.

Section 6 Conclusion

Wrapping up the previous discussion on the investigation into the ways the role of autonomy in autistic adolescents shapes the development of altruistic behaviors, it has become clear that the level of autonomy in an autistic adolescent directly affects the level of altruism the adolescent displays. The impact of the social environment on one’s autonomy and one’s autonomy correlating with lower levels of altruism continues to justify the thesis.

Section 7 Further Research

Measuring altruism – The measurement of altruistic behaviors is subjective and hard to measure but is seen on a spectrum of more or less.

Is altruism voluntary? Can we recognize it when we are doing it?

Challenges within altruism include the fact that altruism will not occur in the absence of sufficient motive, means, and opportunity.

Can you ever really identify or empathize with someone similar to yourself without being somewhat dependent on them?

Did you like this example?

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