Both of us are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and I am additionally diagnosed with obsessive–compulsive disorder.
Features of the social mindset had been in our discourse since around 2015, and terms similar to the ‘social mindset’ had been used to collectively identify them, however the term ‘social mindset’ arose in April 2019.
The social mindset arose primarily as a subjective model of exclusion, where the term was used to describe psychological and behavioural features we both lacked but everyone else we saw had. Given this, the model took no effort to build initially. All of the features had a social undertone; most had an obvious social reason for being in the model, but some did not initially have an immediately explainable social reason for being there. Regardless, we knew there to be some sort of fundamental commonality among all of them, and they remained in the model and in our discourse.
It soon became obvious that other animals also lacked the features of the model. It also gradually became clear that a commonality among most of the features of the social mindset was that they were only beneficial to the individual within the context of the social group, that any individual espousing the features without a social group would either receive no benefit or suffer a deleterious effect on survival. Likewise, the commonality among the features we retained was that they were much more often the product of mechanisms that could be beneficial to the individual’s survival without a social group.
Rarely, in the media or on the Internet, we came across people we considered to have some features of our condition but who still significantly retained the social mindset. We never saw anyone who lacked the social mindset to the degree we did. The phenomenon we observed was that as soon as someone displayed one feature of the social mindset, it could be expected that they either displayed, supported, valued or understood many of the other features of the social mindset, often to a similar degree. This consolidated the unity of the model.
This changed in July 2019 when, for the first time, we discovered more information that confirmed to us a third person who lacked the social mindset to the degree we did. This person was also diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
Throughout 2019, I researched genetics and neuroscience to understand the mechanisms behind our condition and the social mindset. I had already planned to write about the social mindset prior to 2019. In 2019, I had planned to write in the form of a one-off publication or series of publications, but I continued to make new discoveries, repeatedly delaying the process. This led me to switch to deciding to create a website that could be continually updated.
I came upon the most significant discoveries in 2020, which culminated in the creation of this site in April 2020 and its publishing in December. These discoveries also allowed me to confirm that I lacked the social mindset to a slightly more severe degree than both my friend and the third person.