The RTMITE test is poorly designed, because it is more plausibly a test of vocabulary, of tolerance of ambiguous questions, & of one's ability to produce normatively acceptable answers, than it is a test of one's capacity to imagine what another human is feeling.

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The construct it is based on - that autistic people have impaired Theory of Mind & so struggle to imagine what others are feeling - is mostly considered incorrect now, so the whole premise is invalid. But also - the photos are of actors making faces. There is no real emotion to read.

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But I think it's important to point out the failings at an empirical level, rather than just appealing to common sense & shared experience. Otherwise discourse turns into this apparent conflict between the data of serious but detached scientists & the folksy wisdom of lay autistics.

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I admit to being surprised at how laughably poor the evidence base is for theories that gained such traction - how circular the logic is, how prima facie inadequate the instruments used for measuring traits like 'empathy' are, how small & unrepresentative the sample sizes are, & so on

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I am writing about the history of autism as a diagnosis, & while a lot of autistic people have heard that Simon Baron-Cohen's theories around Extreme Male Brain & impaired Theory of Mind were flawed, very few know *why* they're flawed, beyond their being on the face of it, silly & reductive.

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