"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

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.

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

Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison, he can't care.

A writer whom Kirby scarred somehow

As doctor whatshisorherface said, the first percentage is just showing participant age group, as both lists add up to 100%.

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 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.

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.

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

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

My dad had to mow the lawn when I was away or heavily distracted because I'd cry about the dandelions and daisies being cut down lol

Still irks me to this day when I have to do it.

Oh no the poor newspapers

Downvoting so comment is happy

Goddammit you got me

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10053878/1/Personification%20in%20autism_final%20accepted.pdf

I hear sci hub is a pretty cool website that lets you find a paper by its doi number

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

https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318793408

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