Confounding the nerd/Asperger’s stereotype

I’ve seen results from the Asperger’s quiz posted by lots of people I know, and I just want to point out something about these results. I know “me and my friends” is the essence of an anecdotal sample, and not a useful one, but still…

The stereotype is that people who are particularly apt at programming (and similar nerd activities) tend to be at least mildly “aspie”–the symptoms of concentration, abstraction, and even social awkwardness all being things that in a mild form would presumably contribute to success in a field where laser-sharp focus on complex abstract systems is crucial.

However, what I’ve noticed is that all my computer geek friends, science geek friends, and even myself, are quite heavily neurotypical. Indeed, among the sample I’ve seen there’s, if anything, a strong correlation against aspie tendencies among the people the stereotype suggests you would find them in. Hell, most of the people I’ve seen who were seriously over on the Asperger’s side were writers. An argument could be made that writing, especially SF genre writing, is another field where some of the symptoms of Asperger’s might be helpful in mild doses, but that certainly flies in the face of the received wisdom of writer as left-brain creative type, deeply in touch with their feelings and the feelings and relationships of others.

There’s not a lot of point in devoting a lot of thought to some anecdotal observations on the results of internet survey, I know, but I thought the contra-stereotypical results were interesting.

Anyway, here’s my results, which you can see are pretty strong neurotypical:

Your Aspie score: 52 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 162 of 200
You are very likely neurotypical

For comparison, here’s my wife’s results, which appear to be substantially more towards the Asperger’s side. While she is a powerful academic, and a great programmer herself, I don’t think anyone would dispute the claim that I’m the bigger geek–so just between the two of us we’re confounding the stereotype.