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Disability Injustice or Thin Slice Judgements ?

pietro_21

I am looking back at different individual events across my career. At times I still feel that the workplace is one giant systematic nepotistic pile. I would now categorise a lot of these negative experiences as disability injustice in one form or another.

Someone highlighted what I might be experiencing might actually be related to thin slice judgements being made, because of my autism. Certainly some of this applies, but the definitions of disability injustice seem to fall exactly in line with how I viewed those situations. 

 I just wondered whether anyone else had experienced something similar? 

The definitions for anyone who may not be aware: 

Disability injustice 
involves systemic discrimination, ableism, and inequality, where disabled people face unfair treatment, exclusion, and barriers to rights in employment, services, and daily life. Protected by the Equality Act 2010, this includes direct/indirect discrimination, harassment, and failure to provide "reasonable adjustments". 
Key aspects of disability injustice include:
  • Employment Barriers: Being overlooked for jobs, fired due to absences, or denied adjustments to perform tasks.
  • Systemic Discrimination: Inaccessible public services, transport, and environments that exclude disabled people.
  • Forms of Injustice:
    • Direct: Treating a person less favorably because of their impairment.
    • Indirect: Rules or policies that disadvantage disabled people.
    • Harassment/Victimisation: Intimidation or unfair treatment for complaining about discrimination.
  • Legal Protections (UK): The Equality Act 2010 protects against these, and organizations like Inclusion London and Disability Rights UK work to fight for rights.
  • Intersectionality: Discrimination often intersects with factors like sex, race, age, or sexual orientation. 
Thin slice judgments
are rapid, often unconscious evaluations of people or situations based on minimal, short-duration information, usually under five minutes (often seconds) of behavior, facial expressions, or posture. Developed as a psychological concept, these quick impressions can surprisingly predict outcomes, such as personality traits or teacher effectiveness, as accurately as longer observations. 
Key Aspects of Thin Slice Judgments
    • Basis: They rely on nonverbal cues like clothing, body language, posture, and facial expressions.
    • Accuracy: Research by Ambady and Rosenthal (1992) suggests these brief snapshots can be surprisingly accurate in predicting interpersonal consequences, such as teacher effectiveness or salesperson competence
      .
  • Clinical/Social Utility: These judgments are used to gauge personality traits, emotional states (anxiety, depression), and social characteristics.
  • Bias and Limitations: While sometimes accurate, thin slices can lead to negative, long-lasting, and unfair stereotypes, particularly against autistic individuals, who may be judged harshly within seconds of a first impression. 
Contextual Applications
  • Autism: Neurotypical observers often form negative, instantaneous, and inaccurate perceptions of autistic individuals, leading to social devaluation and decreased willingness to interact.
  • Clinical Settings: Clinicians can accurately identify personality disorders or patient emotions from very brief video clips.
  • Social Life: People quickly assess trustworthiness, social status, and competence in strangers. 
In essence, while thin-slicing is an effective, natural, and efficient mechanism for navigating social life, it is heavily susceptible to prejudice and inaccurate, snap-judgment biases. 
Parents

  • Thin slicing or thick slicing, Surely the only question is whether the other person’s assessment is accurate? For sure many people will assume a quick judgement is likely to be wrong. But we humans have evolved over millennia to make judgments about each other. 

  • in reply to Professor Precise-a-bug

    Although I'd never heard the term before I make thin slice judgements about people, usually along the lines of "are they a danger to me?" We all make these sorts of judgements all the time and often unconciously, like "is it safe to cross the road?" I think these judgements are very much part of the way our brains evolved. One of the problems is that our societies have evolved at a much faster rate than our brains. We all need to develop the awareness to challenge our automatic assumptions and judgements and do some reality checking.

Reply
  • in reply to Professor Precise-a-bug

    Although I'd never heard the term before I make thin slice judgements about people, usually along the lines of "are they a danger to me?" We all make these sorts of judgements all the time and often unconciously, like "is it safe to cross the road?" I think these judgements are very much part of the way our brains evolved. One of the problems is that our societies have evolved at a much faster rate than our brains. We all need to develop the awareness to challenge our automatic assumptions and judgements and do some reality checking.

Children
  • in reply to Phased

    Thinking Grimacing I could have never known, it probably doesn’t change my view of him Rofl

  • in reply to pietro_21

    how's this one  ?  "I asked Freud if I could use his bathroom to clear my head. He said, 'Of course, but be careful—in this house, the line between the Id and the Ego is white, about four inches long and laid out on a mirror."

  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    I was at his house last week to visit his couch and it’s never crossed my mind he was a coke head. Ai is made for these nuggets of information.

  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    Spot on, TheCatWoman. My wife and I are totally with you on this—we’ve actually been talking about him as more of a 20th-century shaman than a real scientist.
    You hit the nail on the head regarding his row back on child abuse. By pivoting from the Seduction Theory to "unconscious fantasies" just to save his own skin, he essentially silenced victims for a hundred years. As for the penis envy and vagina spiders—it’s pure "off his trolley" territory. Like you said, the coke likely gave him that bulletproof ego where he stopped listening to patients and started preaching his own myths as gospel.
    That said, he did manage to "brand" one thing well: the talking cure. While humans have been talking through their problems with friends and priests et al for centuries, Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer took that natural act and clinicalised it into a professional procedure. Even if he was a drug-fueled shaman spinning a creation myth, he was the first to formalise the idea that our past affects our present and that structured talking could be a medical treatment.
    He was a charismatic storyteller who managed to change how we view the mind, even if he did it from a cocaine-induced pedestal.
    Glad to see someone else calling out the dodgy shaman behind the curtain!
  • in reply to Phased

    One of my big beefs with Freud is his identification of child sexual abuse in his patients that he rowed back on. Early in his practice when he was just getting established I can understand why he felt he couldn't carry on believing his patients, but later when his practice was established he still stuck to his theories rather than believing his patients. If he had felt able to speak up on behalf of his patients work on and recognition of child sexual abuse would be 100 years further on and maybe not so many would be suffering? 

    Things like penis envy right from when I very first heard the idea, I thought, F*** no, the guys off his trolley, the same with the identification of fear of spiders being actually fear of the adult vagina and sex, I mean WTF? I couldn't believe that people actually took this stuff seriously and that he wasn't laughed out of practice. Using coke tends to make you feel more like you're right and less able to take any criticism constructive or not, I've known quite a few coke users and they're very credible, charismatic and believable, they're frequently wrong too.

  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    I really like your 'Windows on an Apple' analogy  —it perfectly captures why so many neurodivergent people feel alienated by standard psychology. I have a slightly different take on Freud himself though: what if we viewed him more as a 20th-century shaman rather than a scientist?
    If we see his cocaine use not as a distraction that ruined his work, but as his version of shamanic plant medicine, his 'ridiculous' theories start to look more like a personal mythology or a map of the spirit world. In that light, he wasn't necessarily trying to find a universal truth for every brain; he was acting as a medicine man for his own specific tribe—the neurotypical society of his time.
    Maybe the reason his ideas feel so off to a neurodivergent brain today isn't just because they’re old—it's because a shaman's rituals only work if you share their cosmology. If your operating system is different, his spells simply have no power over you.
  • in reply to Phased

    Phased, I'm not trying to have a go at you and I'm really sorry if you think I was. I made that comment about Freud, because he did take huge amounts of coccaine and I do think it negatively impacted some of his ideas. I do believe that we should be grateful to him for giving us a language to speak about some of our inner processes with, but I find a of his idea's ridiculous, but I know he was a product of his time.

     Drug use in a shamanic setting is a very different thing, as is drug use in a theraputic setting, I think psychodelics are better for  psychotheraputic interventions, there's been a lot of recent research into how they can help people who suffer from PTSD. I'm not sure I'd recommend coke for this, as a pain killer and energiser yes, but not for deep inner work on the self.

    I'm dubious about a lot of psychology, as you know, I question things, especially when someone puts something in front of me and pronounces it a near universal truth, I need to give it a poke with a stick and see what it does. To me a hell of a lot of it makes little sense and I wonder if like so many other things, it's been tested on a formulated by NT's and if ND's have been taken into consideration? Our brains are different, could it be possible that psychology as it is now runs well on an NT brain, but for ND's it's like trying to run windows on an Apple?

  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    Please knock me back if you wish   as I'm coming here to chat for some light relief after a heavy day - I reckon my response might be a bit jocular but anyway.

    "wonder if so much credence would be given to the ramblings of any other coke head"   There is some suggestion that the likes of Freud et al use this sort of chemical agency to "liberate" their minds somewhat in order to get another angle on things that can be useful.  Shamen have been using that sort of stuff for years - guess it depends on the society and the social controls on the use of that sort of thing.  Personally I reckon it's generally not as good as a bit of old fashion meditation - albeit it requires less hard work to get to the point of disassociation... 

    Type 1 thinking I personally am drawn into by fear rather than itself being the initial cause of fear.  Acknowledged that it does "snowball" and I completely agree that it can eventually become a fearful experience ironically when one realises one is in it!  (does that make sense... ? :-)  )  

    Running away from a predator makes one a potential meal as it indicates to the predator that.  Even my lovely pet dogs sense when I'm afraid - fortunately they don't think of me as dinner but the provider of dinner I think!

    Yes that sort of collaboration with animals maybe occurred first and continues at it's best today when both are employing "type 2" thinking.

  • in reply to Phased

    I've been away from anything like clinical practice for many years now and I never was good at psychology. Psychology is often something I argue with, there seems to me to be a fundamental set of assumptions behind much of it and either I don't know what they are or disagree with them altogether. I know psychology has come a long way since Freud, and I certainly disagreed with a lot of what he said and wonder if so much credence would be given to the ramblings of any other coke head? 

    Does psychology fit with ND or do we need to broaden our understanding, we know that autistic people for instance, experience the world very differently, so are these pronouncements as true for us as they are an NT? For instance will we use type one thinking for things like "normal" social interactions and type 1 for things we really should be afraid of? Maybe this sort of behaviour is evolutionary too? Maybe some of us stopped and thought about interacting with elephants and wolves rather than running away or fighting them? Could this sort of thing helped us domesticate animals, after all domesticating animals is a bit of an odd things to do and must of been even odder when it first started?  

  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    I agree  

    As you may already be aware. Clinically there is a distinct difference between what are termed Type1 and Type 2 thinking, one fast and intuitive the second slow and reasoned.   Type 1 is more suited to (in my opinion) fight or flight situations type 2 to where one has time to measure and reflect. 

    I too suspect that the correlate to societal evolution sits in this framework - "the pace of life" is consistently much faster and the thinking overload is potentially much greater than things may have been through most of human history.