Believing The Worst: Hostile Intent Attribution Bias

ADHD, Autism, and negative intent attribution bias

Assumptions

When an Autistic person or person with ADHD receives a comment or has an interaction with someone that is neutral, we are more likely to interpret the person’s actions or words as negative, even malicious.

This is known as hostile intent attribution bias — it describes a tendency to interpret someone’s words or behaviour towards us in the most negative light, or to assume someone’s intentions were unfriendly when they were not.

The research is limited, but various studies have demonstrated the following possible causes of hostile attributions:

• Emotional dysregulation
• Self-blame
• Low self-esteem and self-concept
• Poor working memory and episodic memory
• Executive functioning and social processing difficulties
• Different interpretations of social cues compared to neurotypical (NT) people
• A history of experiencing frequent bullying, criticism, correction, and rejection
• Cognitive distortions such as mental filtering, personalization, and mind-reading.

Emotional dysregulation

If we already struggle with emotional regulation, it stands to reason that we may jump to conclusions more quickly, or perceive interactions in an overly negative light.

When we are already feeling anxious, upset, angry, etc., we are more likely to remember and make associations between past instances when we felt that way and current situations.

In other words, being angry makes us angrier, and feeling mad or upset makes us susceptible to seeing things through a negative lens. This is due to something called state-dependent memory, which is a perfect segue into the next underlying cause.

Memory

Episodic memory is described as, “the memory system in charge of the encoding, storage and retrieval of personally experienced events, associated with a precise spatial and temporal context of encoding”.

Essentially this means remembering things we have experienced, including specific details such as time and place.

Part of working memory is recalling past instances which are similar to one we are presently experiencing, remembering what we learned from them, and applying that knowledge to the current situation.

People with executive functioning difficulties often struggle with these specific types of memory, in particular Autistics and those with ADHD. When we struggle to accurately recall past events, we’re less likely to learn from past experiences wherein we misinterpreted someone’s intent.

That said, when we’ve had many past experiences which involved people behaving in ways that were harmful to us, we’re more likely to remember those.

This is thought to be evolutionarily important: Learning from and remembering situations in which we may have been in danger is important for keeping us safe in the future.

Social & communication differences

A lot of neurodivergent (ND) folks struggle to communicate effectively with neurotypical (NT) folks — and vise-versa. When we perceive, interpret, and express ourselves differently from another neurotype, it is understandable that miscommunications will happen.

The difficulty arises when one is in the minority and one’s social and communication style is considered “deficient”, rather than simply different.

When a neurodivergent person expresses feeling confused or hurt by a neurotypical person’s words or behaviours we’re more likely to experience gaslighting, invalidation, minimization, and outright dismissal of our feelings.

We’re often characterized as “over-reacting”, instead of people understanding that we have nervous systems which differ from NTs, therefore we experience the world differently.

Knowing something intellectually is not the same as knowing it in one’s body.

Shades of grey

While I do struggle with black-and-white thinking, and most definitely have struggled with hostile intent attribution bias in my younger years, it’s not as simple as that.

At some points I probably did over-react to a situation, or misinterpret someone’s behaviour as malicious when it was not. That is highly likely. I am also painfully aware that there were many occasions upon which people did make intentional efforts to harm or hurt me.

We NDs are tired. We live in a world built by and for NTs, one which often does not understand — nor try to understand — our experience. A lifetime of being misjudged and mistreated is bound to lead to sensitivity to rejection and a wariness or mistrust of others, especially those we don’t know well.

When you believe someone is over-reacting, remember: emotions are not rational. We cannot help the nervous systems we are born into, nor some of the experiences which shape how our brains and bodies respond to the world around us. Knowing something intellectually is not the same as knowing it in one’s body.

Rather than blame one side or the other, it is much more helpful to respect one another’s perspectives and work to bridge the communication gaps, rather than expect one party to carry all the weight.

Communication and relationships are not uni-directional, they require efforts from all parties.

Besides, we neurodivergent folks are definitely not the only ones who misinterpret the intentions of others — have you seen the Internet lately?

© Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB

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