I had to grit my teeth to restrain myself from looking this up

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362361318793408

https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318793408

https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/1362361318793408

Downvoting so comment is happy

I'm not autistic and I feel the same way. It makes me sad to throw something away if it's still got some use in it.

I apologize to my things when I accidentally bang them against something.

Sometimes objects im using have like, a personality and desire? Like they won't want to get thrown out or there's some kind of relationship between two forks.

Its kind of subconscious - I'm only somewhat aware of it. Its weird.

Also when in recalling things Ive learned recently I'll sometimes recall a place I've been to as well. This happens most frequently with code for some reason. Programs I've written or functions will be strongly tied to places in some way? I don't get it.

T is male. M is female and dating Mr. N.

back in the olden times, straight lines were masculine and curved lines were feminine.

/kicks -1hp

I think you are misreading this. The age sections at the top are just a demographic breakdown of the two groups. Note rhat all the different percentages for age sum to 100. The results are just the bottom section of your screenshot ("anthromorphic questionnaire"). Does seem to be statistically significant.

The actual results are in the text. 56% personifiers among autists vs 33% among not autists, p<0.05. Self report is p=0.06.

I'm pretty sure the age and gender in that table is just showing the frequency of the ages in the sample, not a crosstab of age or gender with personification/anthropomorphism.

So that's saying their autistic population skewed younger than their non-autistic population. Which isn't unsurprising, it's a lot easier to get a diagnosis as a child, and generally easier to get diagnosed now compared to a few decades ago. So people over 35 or so are going to just be less likely to have had the opportunity for diagnosis. The authors do address differences in gender representation between the samples but I don't see age addressed specifically. It could just be that younger people tend to personify/anthropomorphize more, so since the sample of people with autism skewed pretty heavily towards the 16-24 group the results could instead be displaying differences by age. I don't think they quite have the sample size to delve into age too much. I think they'd only be able to get away with doing two groups at 34 & under and 35+. That would be a good start though.

This is also a heavily self-selected population, apparently largely from social media. I'm always automatically skeptical of social media sampling.

I would've liked to see a little more detail about exactly which tests and assumptions they were using. The gender difference looks like they did a t-test, but it's left to the reader to assume they ran a two-tailed t-test. They could easily have bolstered their numbers by reporting the one-tailed test.

The only real difference is for below age 24. Then its pretty much the same if not less prevalent for autists.

By 24 we learn that people find it weird and stop doing it

I've noticed a lot of things that are considered autistic in the states specifically may be normal practice in various cultures, having worked with people in Germany, and from a large swath of Asia.

It interests me a bit, but I think the takeaway is that autism tends to manifest in a number of quirks, and the ones that don't align with the current culture the autistic person is in are the ones that are paid attention to. That and there tends to be a bit more obsession over said quirks than in those cultures, sometimes to the detriment of the autistic person or their social life.

Albert "Al" Autism. Most famous scientist in his field

A lot of people with autism feel bad when you hurt an objects feelings, which contradicts the traditional "autism is when no empathy" narrative.

Scientific papers are often titled "What it's actually about: something witty." This one is about object personification and so after the colon they personify the paper itself by giving it an emotion.

"This paper will be very sad if you don't read it."

Implying that if you read the paper to avoid making it sad you are autistic.

So it's just one more bad autism joke