Are people with autism borderline sociopaths?

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Let me see if I can help you out...

Lets say you're on your way home from work and your car breaks down. You call the nearest towing service and have your car towed to the nearest dealership mechanic. You then have to call for a family member to come pick you up and drive you home. This makes your family member late for his scheduled doctors appointment.

Was your riding home with this family member intentional?

My brain can see paying the extra dollar for the cup the same way, as an unplanned and unfortunate necessity en-route to an unchanged original goal.

It seems like what's going on is my brain can interpret "intentional" as have two separate, but possibly overlapping, meanings.

1.) Something is intentional if it conforms to a preconceived plan or scheme.
2.) Something is intentional if it is done willfully.

It seems like in the free cup story the NT brain can only interpret the question in the context of meaning 2. When I read the question I felt slightly confused by it. My immediate reaction was "what's the point of this question, is the author trying to trick me somehow?". After the first story my mind jumped to the thought "Was there ever some kind of scheme to obtain the free cup? .... Of course not! ... It was entirely incidental." After reading the second story my mind was already thinking in a parallel manner "Was there ever some kind of scheme to pay an extra dollar? ... Of course not! ... Who in their right mind would want to pay more for something? ... He obviously didn't know ahead of time that the vendor had raised the price."

So obviously in interpreting the question I was drawn to meaning 1 rather than meaning 2 in the first story. In the first story 1 and 2 give the same answer - unintentional. Obtaining the free cup was neither willful nor planned. However the second story has a different answer depending on the precise meaning of "intentional". Paying the extra dollar was willful but it wasn't planned.

The reason why we interpret the question differently still baffles me a bit.

Perhaps it is because the decision to receive the fancy cup or not was out of his control (decided by the service worker), whereas the decision to pay the extra dollar was withing his control (could have left and gone to different store.) Really, though, he could've refuse the fancy cup and gone somewhere else as well, so accepting the fancy cup had to be intentional as well.

??

:oops: i still don't totally get it even after reading the explanations, but i don't wanna derail the thread with my thickheadedness. i even had my NT ex-husband try to explain it to me.

ediself: you can change the variables so it's not about dollars or drinks.

That and the fact that I don't value "one dollar" maybe as much as an NT does? To me it's not a decision. It's putting my hand in my pocket, paying, and processing the one dollar thing AFTER having walked away with my drink.

Really? Do you think that would be true regardless of what kind of budget people are on? I tend to think I don't value money, spend it and give it away rather freely, but its cos I dont need it very much and others do.

In the story I'm told Joe is dehydrated and so I know he really wants that big drink. The primary intention is to go get a big drink.

Cup - If I was Joe getting the cup would be incidental, a dull annoyance. The cup passes from the vendor to him as a side effect of getting the big drink. Getting a cup was unintentional.

Presumably Joe also pays more for this Mega-Smoothie in the commemorative cup, so he still choses to pay extra to get the bigger cup but nobody is asking me about that in this story.

Dollar - In the second story Joe is asked to make a decision whether or not to pay more to get an extra large drink. He choses to pay more to get the larger smoothie so I see paying more as intentional, because he made a choice.

Oh I don't know.

I think aspies allow the question to frame the scenario whereas NTs use their social assumptions. Sort of like "Since the question of intentionally paying an extra dollar was asked it must have meaning, both answers must be possible, so how can he unintentionally pay extra? Well, if that was never his original intention." That is, we see into the mind of the storyteller, not the characters in the story. I'm not sure if that fits my more ambitious hypothesis but I'm confident it's what's happening.
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But he would also need to make the choice whether or not he wants to be "burdened" with the cup. I think I've got it: logically they are exactly the same, but there is an emotional connection with the money.