— ACS

— ACS

If so, I should mention that I also meant the signals override any (un)ethical behavior the people in question engage in, as well as any (un)ethical words.

Most of the torturers I’ve known are “nice people” and that’s part of why they manage to avoid even a reprimand. One woman I know used to do all kinds of awful things to people, but she was “nice”. I don’t mean like Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter either, who was sickly-sweet fake-nice. This woman had the demeanour that caused people to believe that she was a down-to-earth, somewhat hippieish, and absolutely caring and loving woman. Even if they saw her doing things to her “students” that can only be described as severe abuse. Her “nice signals” overrode her actions and made them seem less heinous.

I have seen the same thing happen with murderers and attempted murderers. (Including ones I’ve known. Uh, background, I’ve lived in institutions, I’ve known a lot of really scary staff. That’s how I know all these people who’ve done these awful things, and observed how people perceive them based on the other signals they give out.)

I also remember a particular woman who I picked up on immediately as really scary. But I knew that she was sending out some kind of signals I could barely read, and they turned out, from what other people described, to be definite “I am nice” signals. She turned out to be doing a number of illegal and horrible things to both her coworkers who worked for her at the agency she was in, and the disabled clients of that agency. Whenever coworkers found out about her, I noticed they were always shocked, “…but she seemed so nice.”

But there are also people in which there’s much less… I don’t know the word. Much less malice maybe. Much less intentional misleading in the “I am nice” signals, much less overt scariness than that woman. I have known a number of people who have done major and minor things wrong and gotten away with it on the “I am nice” signal grounds, including one woman who, stunningly, confessed exactly what she was doing and why, knowing it was illegal, but still manages to be okay somehow, because of the ever-present “I am nice”.

The staff person I described in my post, was successfully slandered and nearly prevented from getting any more jobs, which was made far easier by her lack of “I am nice” signals and the definite “I am nice” signals of her fairly slimy bosses.

Last year I was (along with many others) in a life-threatening situation due to the actions of a particular agency (not a disability agency), and we were basically told, including by the mayor himself, that the head of that agency was a nice and generous person and that therefore we should not bother him with little things like our inability to breathe inside his housing project. (I’m not making this up.)

I’m not sure how much that last one was “I am nice” signals and how much it was the ever-present social networking crap.

But I’ve definitely seen “I am nice” signals cover stunningly unethical actions, as well as words.  (I also, to clear up any confusion or generalizations about autistic people, do ethics largely by instinct, but I describe them in words.)

What I meant is that a lot of neurotypical people act according to their monkey brain — the social-functioning “coprocessor” — rather than according to the logic-processing higher functions. Even when what someone is saying is obviously unreasonable and offensive, when it’s combined with OH SO NICE signifiers, the OH SO NICE signifiers may be more predictive of their personal behavior than the unreasonable things they’re obviously saying; most NTs don’t think about ethics as something they think about, other than as a series of axioms, but as something they do. As in: ethical behavior comes out of instinct, not reason.

— ACS