A “Sense of Justice” is the internal moral belief in fairness, equality, and rightness, leading individuals to perceive injustice when it occurs and motivating them to act against it. An “Autistic Sense of Justice” refers to the heightened awareness and distress experienced by many Autistic People in response to unfairness, inequity, or violations of rules, leading to a strong desire to correct these injustices, even when it creates personal difficulty. The Autistic Sense of Justice is built on a preference for patterns and preference for clear rules. This preference is a way to simplify the world in to easier choices that the Autistic Person often doesn’t have the energy (Spoons) to address in stress times. The Autistic Sense of Justice has a few variants that can give you clues about what his happening neurologically, which can help you better manage conflict, problems and yourself.

Understanding the Autistic Sense of Justice

Theories about the Autistic Sense of Justice and Strong Moral Compass are thought to stem from from traits like empathy, intense interests, and a strong preference for clarity and order, which can make unclear rules or unequal treatment particularly distressing. To some extent, I agree with some of these ideas. We’ll break those down soon.

In my experience, this often puts Neurodivergent people at odds with people who like to distort right, wrong and the past. Neurodivergent people often have a strong preference for Clarity, Order and the Truth and a Strict Moral Code that is resistant to peer group pressure, which can be at odds with people who are trying to take advantage of people’s conflict avoidance and gullibility. This can lead to conflict or vulnerability with abusive people.

Strong Moral Compass

A part of neurodivergence is Fatigue and the Fight for Resources (covered in detail below). This leads to certain simplifications and rigidness, which often lead to a fairly strict moral code. This moral code may be similar to a social groups (church, average society), or a personal moral code (which may be hard for others to get). This gives the neurodivergent a Strong Moral Compass. There will also be some neurodivergent people who solve this problem by having a very Flexible Moral Compass.

Strong Empathy

A hypothesis about Autistic people from a century ago was that Autistic people were not very empathetic – the word Autism etymologically means “selfish” (auto-ism). This has been demonstrably shown to be untrue [Autistic People’s Experience of Empathy and the Autistic Empathy Deficit Narrative]. Frustratingly, many people still think that this is a fundamental truth to Autism and research continues with this assumption in mind [An Expert Discussion on Autism and Empathy, Empathy and Autism], but it seems that part of the problem is where the assessor for empathy has difficulty recognising the empathy in Autistic people – the Double Empathy Problem, or an difference in the emphasis in different modes of empathy, the Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis. Other confounding variables that are not factored into most research are that many Autistic people struggle with interception (the ability to look within) and so do not report well how they are feeling, but act on those feelings regardless; and many Autistic people put more emphasis on logical thought and pattern completion than impulsive empathetic actions (we won’t explore these in this section).

“If the tool you are holding is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Empathy is somewhat complex.

Type 1 – Cognitive Empathy

We have a cognitive understanding about someone’s position and can imagine ourselves in that situation, recognising that we might want some help or experience some discomfort – this type of empathy is called Cognitive Empathy and relies on a theory of mind. Another old idea is that Autistic people generally struggle to have a good theory of mind, the ability to imagine someone else’s situation, and research has shown that this also is generally false.

Type 2 – Affective Empathy

The second kind of empathy is the feeling you have when you see or imagine someone else’s situation – this type of empathy is called Affective Empathy.

Type 3 – Compassionate Empathy

These two kind of empathy combine to create a third type of empathy – Compassionate Empathy, the desire to do something because you understand and feel the other person’s discomfort.

Type 4 – Somatic Empathy

Part of what feeds these empathies is the mirror neurons, which help you to imagine and feel the situation someone else is in – often called Physical or Somatic Empathy.

Double Empathy Problem

Empathy is further complicated by the so called “Double Empathy Problem“, where Part 1 relates to the recognition that it is harder for Neurodivergent people to empathise with someone from outside of their neurotype (common neurotypicals, but can be another neurodivergent group, or person within the group that is on the other side of the spectrum), and Part 2 is recognising that the other person finds it harder to recognise the empathy that the person in Part 1 is feeling and showing, leading to that second person not feeling empathised with, even if the person in Part 1 is truly empathising. That is, the measurement of “unempathetic” is a failure of the examiner measuring empathy to understand how the person feels and expresses empathy.

Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis (EIH) Problem

A common, growing, hypothesis is the Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis (EIH), where an Autistic persons has a “deficit of cognitive empathy but a surfeit of emotional empathy“, which may be true for some Autistic people, but there are many where this is not true.

Too Much Empathy

Many Autistic people state that they often feel too much empathy and don’t know what to do with it. Their Compassionate Empathy is high, where they feel like they should fix the problem, leading to actions as a result of their empathy for the perceived struggle someone is going through.

Intense Interests

Intense interests may be a feature of the Autistic Sense of Justice, however it is not as direct. If you have a strong interest in politics, you may understand quite a bit of the history and situation that is going on and recognise the injustices of the current situation.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

This can lead to a neurodivergent person feeling greater urgency to do something before the predicted bad outcome happens. Due to reasons of Fatigue and the Fight For Resources, this increase in priority is often accompanied by a surge in adrenaline, leading to pressured action.

Strict Moral Code

We learn as children various society values such as “do to other’s what you want them to do to you”, “be kind to people” and “see a problem, fix the problem”. These are excellent basic ideas for young people. Most neurotypical people learn that there are limits to these, where you don’t want to treat your bully as you want them to treat you – you should keep away from them; you shouldn’t be kind to your bully, you need to be assertive and sometimes aggressively defend yourself; and sometimes when you see the problem, you only report it to someone or at times ignore it.

Neurodivergent people often miss those implicit lessons and don’t receive explicit education on the limits of these simple values. That leads to some very Strict Moral Codes

Research into moral values shows that Autistic people’s decision on right and wrong is strongly resistant to peer pressure, while neurotypical’s often shift their moral decisions when confronted by only a few people who give an opposing opinion. This weakness of neurotypicals to peer group pressure is often presented as a strength, while Autistic people’s rigidity about what is “right and wrong” is often described as a deficit.

Strong Preference for Clarity, Order and Truth

Most neurodivergent people have a strong preference for clarity, order and truth.

Clarity decreases misunderstanding, such as the Double Empathy Problem, or miscommunication about wants, needs and instructions.

Order allows for efficiency. You probably know someone who lives in what looks like a mess, but they know where everything is – your sense of order may not be theirs. Order helps a person with starting, doing and finishing tasks without extra costs (Task Cost Optimisation).

Truth is part of clarity and the strict moral compass. Neurodivergent people tend to tell the blunt truth and be surprised that other’s find this offensive or insensitive. Part of neurotypical communication is dancing around the point of a topic, hinting at what people want and avoiding telling the strict truth about a thing. This makes is unclear what is wanted, unclear about what is expected, and unclear about what the truth is. Neurodivergent people not only prefer to tell the truth, they prefer to be told the truth – it provokes less anxiety.

Not all neurodivergent people have this trait, a minority are avoidant of the truth.

Understanding Why: Fatigue and the Fight For Resources

Autistic People are often fighting for mental resources. This feels like fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, anger / aggression, panic, melt downs and disassociation. The cause behind this if mostly difficulties getting your Neurotransmitters properly in balance for your brain to work efficiently (medication will help), and sometime this is related to the part of your brain that manages this kind of problem didn’t fully develop, giving you a deficit in your cognitive abilities (medication won’t help), or a combination of both (medication will help a bit).

For the brain development aspect, often you will have a compensatory mechanism that can do the job when you are not stressed or low on mental resources, but it works poorly or fails when you are stressed, fatigued or worn out. That can explain why you might be able to do certain things adequately some times, but you then find you can’t do them well or potentially at all if at other times – these times will be characterised by fatigue, juggling too many things, or you have pushed yourself too hard for too long.

A common mechanism for attempting to compensate for this is to simplify what you are doing through a range of systems:

• Task Cost Optimisation
• Forming patterns
• Black and White thinking (only seeing extremes)
• Rigid Thinking (this is how it is)
• Impatience with Guff (avoiding perceived extraneous things)

Task Cost Optimisation

Everything that we do has a cost of some sort. That may be financial, social, knowledge or just internal energy. Hopefully we are all aware of Spoon Theory, how we have a certain amount of personal resource simplified and represented as Spoons. Some people can get more Spoons by strengthening exercises, getting a better paying job, learning new things, medication and help from others. Once you have maximised your Spoons, the next important question is – how do you spend them to get the most from them?

In the linked page, Task Cost Optimisations, we cover how to understand the costs of any given task, identify where you are having difficulties with that task, and some things you can do to reduce the cost so that you don’t waste Spoons.

Often neurodivergent folk will find ways to optimise and simplify repeated tasks, which can lead to high levels of expertise and difficulty in teaching other’s how to do that task. We risk being cursed with competence – too useful to promote.

Preference for Patterns and a Sense of Completeness

Once we have found a method to make a task cheaper to do, we often want to do it the same way. That creates certain patterns of behaviour, or in other words, preferences for how a thing is done. This can be misdiagnosed as OCD. Patterns can also occur due to reasons of comfort, such as stimming, or due to stacking certain tasks together (clumping) to decrease the start up cost of each of the elements in a set of tasks.

If we are not sure why a thing works when we do it a certain way, then we will continue to achieve that outcome by wrote – another pattern of behaviour. Often we prefer to know how to do a thing and why it works, so that if something goes wrong, we can tweak the steps to get the outcome done. When we don’t understand the why, then we only understand one how – when things are ideal. Leaving the path of “this way works” leaves us vulnerable to things going wrong and not knowing why. We can feel helpless and powerless in uncharted territories. That is bad enough on its own, but is magnified when either we have a history with (or present problem with) people who blame us for what isn’t our fault, or if we are low on spoons and don’t have the energy to deal with unexpected changes and the cost of fixing that.

Straight to the Point

Many people have a basic understanding of what they are doing and have a traditional way that they do a task. Some of these traditions are to do with how they were taught, some are to do with a variant of error checking, etc. Often there are superfluous steps that don’t matter most of the time. Autistic people often don’t have the spare energy to do those superfluous steps until they are needed due to an exception, and as such, they will optimise the task to get straight to the point, challenging “tradition” that serves little to no purpose.

Communication with neurotypicals can often be dancing around a topic, hinting at a point, or only being adjacent to the point. For Autistic people, this can be very painful. It introduces uncertainty in what is actually being talked about, what is being asked for and what the outcome decision is. Where possible, Autistic people will talk directly and get straight to the point. This drops ambiguity and saves spoons.

There is benefit in allowing neurotypicals to explore space when they talk around a topic.

• If the topic is possibly sensitive for some people, it allows for a soft discussion without directly offending someone.
• It allows the problem to be explored more effectively before going in to finding a solution (possibly to the wrong problem).
• It allows a range of circumstances to be discussed to create a more flexible solution to the now defined problem.
• It allows all participants in the conversation to get on to the same page, and thus work more in unison than relying on a single person, or having a team of people working at cross purposes.

Sometimes getting straight to the point (in action, or in discussion) is quicker and more efficient. Sometimes adding redundant steps in and indirect discussion has benefits. Neurodivergent people need to learn to increase their indirect methods while Neurotypical people need to learn to be more direct.

Impatience with Guff and Being Derailed

In alignment with the above issues of low spoons and preference for getting Straight to the Point, often Autistic people are Impatient with Guff. In this case, ‘guff’ is trivial or unnecessary talk, ideas or actions.

What I want to highlight here is the impatience, and what drives that irritability. Switching tasks takes effort. Neurotypical people often don’t notice the cost of doing this, so are more fluid to change. Autistic People are often inherently lower in resources, so the effort it noticed more. There is a study that shows that when you change biomes, such as switch from a savannah to a rainforest, we unload information about the prior biome and load up information from for the new biome. This was demonstrated by people reading information from one table, walking down a long wide hall to answer questions at another table and exiting. This was repeated, however a false wall and doorway had been added between the two tables. People who had to walk through the doorway were much worse at answering the questions than those who didn’t – the doorway triggered the changed biome effect.

When we change from one task to another, we do a similar unload and reload. We want to finish the task to a point that we can feel it is completed, or get it to a point that we can pick it back up again later without having to restart. We talk about some of this in Task Cost Optimisation. To help us change tracks, our body gives us a boost of adrenaline to help power the change. When we are low on resources, or if we are sensitive to adrenaline, we can interpret that as anger, which can then trigger a PDA or ODD response (Pathological Demand Avoidance or Oppositional Demand Disorder).

The problem is that Being Derailed triggers this unload and reload system, which can result in an adrenaline fuelled meltdown, PDA (“no” response), ODD (upset the system response) or a freeze shutdown (don’t have sufficient adrenaline to switch).

Impatience with Guff is also adrenaline related. We not only use adrenaline to switch tasks, we use adrenaline start a task and to keep going (covered in Task Cost Optimisation). Switching tasks uses a surge of adrenaline, while starting, maintaining and completing tasks uses a steady flow. To add additional steps to the task requires additional adrenaline, and if we are low, this can result in a refusal response (the defiance we talked about earlier) or a meltdown. Soft versions of this is seen as that Impatience with Guff – where that extra step is seen as the guff.

Black and White Thinking

A major thing that sets humans apart from other animals is higher order thinking, where we look at a problem and develop a deep understanding of it. From that, we develop nuanced thinking about what might be done to solve it and spend time sifting through those options to pick a more optimal solution that is balancing cheap, low effort and positive effective outcomes. The part of our brain that does this higher order thinking is our prefrontal cortex and frontal lobes – the bit of brain just behind your forehead. Most of your Executive Function is held within this area.

The thinking process that leads to better outcomes is slow and expensive to run. This is fine if we have time and spare energy to do so, but what if it is an emergency or we are exhausted? At that time, we need a faster and more decisive method. When our brain detects a clear and present danger, it triggers the Survival Brain Mode.

Our frontal cortex is about intelligence, wisdom, understanding, nuance, brain storming, sifting through options and ultimately problem solving. It sees nuance between options and can find subtle and efficient ways through problems. Our Survival Brain, on the other hand, isn’t subtle or nuanced, and in Survival Brain Mode our frontal cortex activity can either be reduced or shut down. Our Survival Brain bludgeons its way through a task, relying on you being a alive afterwards to fix any problems that crop up due to that blunt and unsubtle solution method. Survival Brain ensures you are alive, not comfortable – which is appropriate if this is an emergency, but rotten if it isn’t. Part of that blunt solution strategy is to remove complexity and see things in terms of opposites – things become a false, simplified dichotomy. Do or Do Not.

Consider an emergency situation where you are about to be run over by a truck. Do you want to think about why you are about to be run over by a truck, whether you like the colour and model, what the truck is carrying, how good the wheel alignment is …. or dive out of the way? In this emergency, everything but “dive out of the way” is not that important when it comes to you living or dying. The Survival Brain switches off (or under powers) the part of the brain that considers all of those other things, and priorities the part of your brain that thinks in terms of the 4 Survival Fs – Freeze, Fawn, Flight or Fight – Flight in this case.

Black and White Thinking is the result of that simplification. Their either is not enough Dopamine for you to run your prefrontal cortex or you have over tapped your Adrenaline (probably to keep on going through fatigue or some other obstacle). Your brain has detected the increase of Adrenaline in your blood and triggered the Survival Brain Mode (which may shut down your slow but powerful prefrontal cortex even if you do have enough Dopamine to run it).

Extremes tend to make it hard to find creative and positive solutions. Black and white thinking is an example of where our prefrontal cortex and frontal lobes are not working effectively, decreasing your ability to think clearly and deeply, which often leads to poor outcomes. This can be caused by low Dopamine, fatigue or a surge in adrenaline.

Without nuance, problems become very black and white. Here are some common black and white thinking that should act as a warning:

• You are either with me, or against me (opposites)
  • There is no perception of partial agreement or challenge to an idea, as this is not fitting into the un-nuanced with or against me.
• You are either supportive, or an adversary
• I did nothing wrong, I am always wrong
  • Neither of these ideas allows for any thing that you can do to make a change
• They are amazing / they are the worst
  • In general, people don’t exist in perfection or its opposite; good people make mistakes, bad people sometimes do things with good results
    • There are some people that are generally good, but we have to allow for them to make some mistakes
    • There are some people who are generally bad, and not mistake their occasional good act as evidence that they are average or good people

A key characteristic to Black and White Thinking is the Sense of Urgency – the conviction that this perceived problem must be dealt with right now and not put off for any longer, even though there is no evidence of someone being directly harmed here and now. If you find yourself feeling that strong sense of urgency, wonder to yourself – “Where is the clear and present danger?”. If no one is being harmed, then there is time to think this through, so slow down, calm down, and assess the situation – more in Retraining the Brain.

Simplification of Complexity

We don’t always live in Survival Brain Mode, however we also often don’t have enough neurotransmitters or clear information to think with in deep understanding either. A strategy to this is to try to simplify the complexity of a thing, either skimping on side details that likely don’t matter (until they do), or being more concerned with the destination than the journey.

This strategy tries to find a happy medium between the need to do a thing now, the lack of resources to get a full understanding of the problem (as outlined in Black and White Thinking), and the lack of resources to fully comprehend the problem or task. Most neurotypicals do not need to simplify tasks to this level as they generally are not fighting for neurotransmitter resources to do every day tasks.

Rigid, Concrete Thinking

A danger of Simplification of Complexity is thinking that the simplified version is the best and only version. For example, while there are an estimated 15 to 40 biological sexes in humans, that only really applies to 1 in around 60 humans; and even then, most of those humans can be seen as having sufficient masculine features to be classed as male or feminine features to be classed as female. This leads to the simplification of “2 biological sexes in humans”, and the unfortunate erasure of the other biological sexes for the sake of simplicity and the blindness to the difference between biological sex, a sense of self identity in sex and the self identification to the roles often attributed to a biological sex group within a culture – aka trans and non-binary people. It certainly doesn’t help that we are taught in preschool to simplify people into two major groups – girls and boys, and frequently isn’t addressed in education until human biology and sex ed in high school – if your high school has a good education program.

With Rigid, Concrete Thinking, we struggle to update a concept that is used as a foundation for a pile of knowledge and or self identity. Neurodivergent people often have to build knowledge trees from certain simplified concepts, which can lead to a rich and complex understanding of other things. Some neurodivergent people are very good at updating a small part of that knowledge tree without needing to re-assess how everything else in that knowledge tree is affected by this change, while many of us are not so good at it, especially if this is a key part of the foundations of that knowledge tree.

Here is an example of an idea that most people struggle with. Gravity is not technically a force. It does not pull you down, nor does it attract you to large objects. That idea is a simplification that we can teach to children so that they kind of get the perceived effect.

Even if you read and understood the explanation above (feel free to talk to physicist’s to check if this is correct), you’ll likely return to your simplified model of “gravity is an attractive force” rather than update your model of how it works. Mostly likely because this model seems like it is too much effort. Spending more time with this more accurate model starts to mess with our sense of “how does time work anyway” and “what is space if it is all bent by mass – are there any straight lines?”. It gets really trippy when you try to figure out what entropy is. When you start grappling with how this affects the concepts of free will and predetermination, your sense of “who am I and did I choose that?” can be bumped in uncomfortable directions. We often run away from these thoughts to protect ourselves and convince ourselves that being technically wrong about gravity isn’t so bad after all.

If that happened to you or when it does, I ask “why are you being such a rigid / concrete thinker?”

The challenge is to work out which concepts need to be updated, even if it is hard work, and which ones can be left alone, because it doesn’t really matter that much – close enough is good enough. My guideline for when to put the effort into changing a concept is “does me having this thought lead to someone being harmed?” (which includes yourself). If there is harm, then it is time to examine both the concept and the alleged harm to make some wise decisions.