Or "Could autism be a result of different strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance?"
Note to self: Cognitive dissonance may not be entirely the right term, depending on the definition. Specifically, is a dissonance between 'how the world should be (according to me)' vs 'how the world is (as I see it)' considered a cognitive dissonance? E.g., if a child wants the red toys to be separated from the blue toys, but their parents mix them and prevent the child from sorting them. Could perhaps be explained by the self-discrepancy theory: a discrepancy between the child's actual self and ideal or ought self, i.e., not having the power/permission to enact the changes they want in the world (actual), but wishing that they did (ideal) or feeling that they should (ought). Note to self: Consider the role of cognitive dissonance in neurodiversity in general. The above example may be more an example of OCD than autism, but there's some overlap and everything is complicated.
Cognitive dissonance: "A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance (rationalization) or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias)."1
What if autistic people don't have the same habits/strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance? Specifically rationalization, which would explain why person-environment fit is so important; instead of changing their attitudes, they maintain the dissonance (and the stress it causes) as long as the external trigger is present. It could be seen as a difference in core values, e.g., autistic people valuing (perceived) logical consistency highly, while neurotypical people may prioritize social aspects higher (e.g., the need to belong).
"The term "magnitude of dissonance" refers to the level of discomfort caused to the person." [...] There is a level of discomfort within each person that is acceptable for living. When a person is within that comfort level, the dissonant factors do not interfere with functioning. However, when dissonant factors are abundant and not enough in line with each other, one goes through a process to regulate and bring the ratio back to an acceptable level. Once a subject chooses to keep one of the dissonant factors, they quickly forget the other to restore peace of mind."1
The degree of cognitive dissonance reduction resistance (or rationalization avoidance), in addition to discomfort tolerance and person-environment fit, may be directly proportional to how high-functioning someone is.
Note to self: Is discomfort synonymous with stress in this context?
I think one reason a higher and higher fraction of the population is diagnosed with autism – aside from a broadening of the definition and increasing social acceptance – is that our environments are less stable and we have less control over them. Another is the compromises people are forced to make in order to earn a living.
To elaborate on the first point, our social environments are more in flux than ever before, e.g., when we or our friends move elsewhere to work. That makes the environment less stable, i.e., it's more likely to change, while perhaps giving some of us more control (i.e., freedom to move away from an unhealthy environment) than villagers hundreds of years ago or in certain developing countries. However, that control has been decreasing for several decades in many developed countries, with an ever increasing ratio of home prices to median household income.
The second point is that more people are forced (or at the very least incentivized) to compromise more, e.g., by moving away from familiar, stable environments in order to earn enough or find work they enjoy.
All this uncertainty and stress, with or without a subconscious aversion to rationalization, presumably contributes to exceeding one's discomfort tolerance, thus interfering with functioning and leading to a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with autism.
A lot of comorbidities could easily be explained by the stress caused by unmitigated cognitive dissonance – and the behaviors listed in the diagnostic criteria could, in turn, be explained by comorbidities (including chronic stress) and learned behavior. I imagine confirmation bias also plays a role in some cases. I suspect especially the criteria related to social deficits are (a lack of) learned behaviors and/or a matter of different priorities (e.g., need to belong being of a lesser priority) as mentioned in Connecting the dots, which may itself be a (very early) learned behavior for all I know. The possibility of autism being a grouping of multiple types of neurodiversity may also be worth investigating.
This hypothesis implies that autistic people are less likely to develop certain biases (through rationalization), while still being subject to bias through ignorance and perhaps more susceptible to certain other biases such as confirmation bias.
As an aside: What would the world look like if cognitive dissonance didn't cause (uncomfortable levels of) psychological discomfort/stress? Also: Relationship between flow state and cognitive dissonance? The hyperfocus often seen in autism could also be seen as an addiction (physical or otherwise): "When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness. Thus enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life."2
Footnotes
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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ↩