"Even with their limited capacities for social interaction and their apparent inability to orient to social stimuli, these autistic kids pick up and endorse social stereotypes as readily as normally developing kids. One take-away point is that stereotypes are very easy to learn and very robust. They don't require higher order attention, or apparently even attention to social stimuli, to develop. Stereotypes can be learned even in the face of damage to the 'social brain' and under extraordinarily constrained conditions"
As a linguist, I think I would say that it seems likely that the mechanisms underlying stereotyping are pretty much the same as for the making and demarcation of semantic fields: i.e. they are essential for the art and acts of naming. In educational terms it seems to me it's the same kind of basic cognitive move as 'chunking'.
Of course there will be ramifications for using this information in tackling racism, but the hope is therefore that education really can help. It's noteworthy to that it may offer hope for other strategies to help autistic people themselves.
Capitalizing on the kids' strengths in understanding social categories might offer an alternative and easier learning method for interpreting the behavior of others, one that doesn't involve "swimming upstream,
ScienceDaily: Autistic Children Recognize Stereotypes Based On Race And Sex, Study Suggests:
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