The 7-Second Judgment: Why Neurotypicals Reject Neurodivergent People

Research shows neurotypical people form negative judgments about autistic, ADHD, and gifted individuals in seven seconds: snap judgments that scale into lifetime systematic exclusion.

Drawing on University of Nottingham studies, we reveal how thin-slice judgments operate faster than consciousness. When audio-visual cues are removed, negative bias disappears, proving neurotypical prejudice targets communication style, not substance.

We investigate the Double Empathy Problem: accusations that autistic people "lack empathy" are projections of neurotypical failures. Research proves neurotypical people struggle to read autistic emotions, yet blame autistic people for communication breakdown.

Learn how seven-second cognitive bias becomes institutional oppression through "epistemic injustice:" systematic devaluation of neurodivergent testimony. From job interviews to healthcare to criminal justice, thin-slice judgments prevent contact needed to challenge prejudice.

But there's hope: Education works. When neurotypical people learn about neurodivergence before judging, negative bias disappears or reverses. Knowledge interventions override automatic prejudice.

We examine how marginalized communities defeated conceptual strongholds: demedicalization of homosexuality, disability rights Social Model, eugenics collapse. The neurodiversity movement deploys these strategies now.

For neurodivergent listeners: You're not imagining it. Documented bias.
For neurotypical listeners: You have unconscious prejudice. Here's how to override it.

Full citations, transcript, extended bibliography at www.neurorebelpodcast.com

Content warnings: discrimination, social rejection, systemic bias.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the 7-Second Judgment
• 1:43 Introduction to NeuroRebel
• 3:21 Understanding Neurotypical Bias
• 3:39 The Research That Changed Everything
• 6:23 Thin Slice Judgments Explained
• 14:24 The Double Empathy Problem
• 22:53 Systemic Exclusion and Its Mechanisms
• 31:35 Historical Examples of Systemic Change
• 39:22 Strategies for Change
• 49:23 A Call To Action

Transcript

Neurorebelpodcast: 0:08

Picture this. You walk into a job interview, you've prepared for weeks. Your credentials are impeccable, your portfolio speaks for itself. The interviewer extends their hand. You shake it, they gesture to a chair and you sit, and then they glance at your resume. In all of this, seven seconds have passed. In those seven seconds before you've answered a single question, before you've demonstrated any competence, before you've said anything of substance, they've made a judgment about you, not about your qualifications, not about your ideas, but about whether they like you or not. And here's what you don't know. This judgment is so robust, so resistant to change that everything you say afterward will be filtered through it. If that initial verdict is negative, you've already lost. Now, what if I told you that this isn't speculation? What if I told you? That researchers have measured this phenomenon, quantified it, and documented it with scientific precision. And what if I told you that if you're neurodivergent autistic, A DHD gifted or any combination, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you in that seven second window. I'm Anita, and this is Neuro Rebel. And today we're talking about neurotypical bias, why it happens and how we can change it. We One person at a time. today's episode is a little longer than my usual one, but I promise you it's worth it. Stick with me. Let's go explore why this happens and why it's more fascinating than you think. Welcome to Neuro Rebel, the bilingual podcast where we dismantle ableist systems, challenge neurotypical assumptions, and explore what it really means to be neurodivergent in a world built for neurotypical brains. If you're new here, welcome to a space where we don't sugarcoat, we don't simplify, and we definitely do not romanticize Neurodivergence. We're here for the late diagnosed, the self-diagnosed, the questioning, the exhausted, the misunderstood, and everyone who's ever felt like they're operating on a different frequency than the rest of the world. I'm autistic gifted, a retired law professor, a Fulbright scholar, and your fellow traveler on this journey toward collective liberation. Every episode is recorded in both English and Spanish because extraordinary minds are not constrained by borders or languages. Today's episode is going to be uncomfortable. We're talking about something most people don't want to acknowledge. The measurable, documented contempt that neurotypical people hold toward neurodivergent people, and how understanding the mechanism of that prejudice is the first step toward dismantling it. Let me tell you about a research study that changed how I understand every awkward social interaction I have ever had. In 2021, a team of researchers at the University of Nottingham did something simple but devastating. They showed neurotypical adults short video clips, averaging just over seven seconds of young men reacting naturally to everyday social situations. A researcher telling them a joke, giving them a compliment, and then keeping them waiting. Just normal human moments, brief glimpses of people just being people. Then they asked the neurotypical observers one question, do you like or dislike this person? That's it a binary choice, yes or no, like or dislike. Here's what the perceivers didn't know. Half of the people in those videos were autistic and half were neurotypical. The two groups were matched for age matched for context, and the only variable was neurotype. The results neurotypical. Perceivers were significantly more likely to judge that they disliked autistic targets and not rated them slightly lower on a scale or not had mild reservations. Actively disliked active negative judgment in seven seconds based on nothing but observable behavior in mundane social moments. and here's the part that should disturb everyone listening. The perceivers had no idea. Anyone in the videos was autistic. They weren't told, they weren't primed, they were just reacting, blindly, reacting. When I first read the study, I had to close my laptop and walk away because suddenly every single interaction I'd ever had made sense. The job interviewer who seemed uncomfortable before I'd set three sentences, and the colleague who avoided me at the coffee machine, or the acquaintance who said, we should get together sometime with a smile, but never really reached their eyes. I thought I was imagining it. I thought I was paranoid. I thought I was too sensitive. Turns out I was accurately perceiving documented bias. So what is happening in those seven seconds? What are neurotypical people reacting to? And the research gave it a name, and it's called Thin Slice Judgments, or TSJ for short. Think of it as your brain taking a photograph and instantly deciding, huh? Friend or foe. Safe or threat in group or outgroup. We all do this. It's evolved cognitive machinery for rapid social assessment. The problem isn't that it exists. The problem is what it's assessing and who it targets. Neurotypical. Perceivers are making rapid judgements based on posture, atypical gestures, facial expressions, patterns of movement, and vocal prosy. They're reacting to style, not substance. They're reacting to how someone moves through space and not who they are as a person. And here's the devastating part. Previous research found that when the audio visual cues were removed, when only the content of what autistic people said was represented when it was stripped of all non-verbal information, the negative judgments disappeared. This means neurotypical people aren't reacting to anything that is inherently wrong or deficient about autistic people. They are reacting to difference itself to an unfamiliar communication style to movements and expressions that don't match their neurotypical template. Now, here's what's crucial. These thin slice judgements don't operate identically across all forms of neurodivergence. Though the underlying mechanism is still the same when neurotypical people encounter autistic individuals, they are reacting primarily to atypical nonverbal communication. The rhythm of the eye contact, the facial expressions, and the body language. however, when they encounter people with A DHD, they're often reacting to movement patterns, the fidgeting, the interrupting, and the high energy that neurotypical people code as disruptive rather than differently regulated. And with giftedness, the bias is conceptual. Before it's even behavioral research shows peers form negative judgments. When they learn someone is gifted before any interaction occurs, the label itself triggers anxiety about hierarchy and difference, different presentations, same mechanisms. Rapid negative judgment based on deviation from neurotypical norms. So you might be thinking, okay, so first impressions can be harsh, but surely once people get to know neurodivergent individuals, those initial judgments change right wrong. The research shows that these thin slice judgements are highly robust. They don't generally change with increased exposure. Let me say that again because this is crucial. Neurotypical people form lasting negative assessments of autistic people within seconds, and those assessments remain stable even after getting to know them. this is the invisible wall neurodivergent people run into every day. The judgment happens before meaningful interaction can even occur. It acts as a gatekeeper ensuring that the positive contact necessary to challenge prejudice is preemptively blocked. You don't get the job, so you can't demonstrate your competence, and you're not invited to the social gathering. So you can't show your personality and you're excluded from the group project. So you can't prove your collaborative abilities. The judgment prevents the very experiences that could contradict the judgment. And here's what kills me, neurotypical people don't even realize they're doing this. It feels like instinct to them. It feels like accurate perception. They experience the discomfort of intergroup anxiety, the stress that comes from interacting with someone whose communication style differs from their own. And they interpret that discomfort as evidence that something is wrong with a neurodivergent person, not with their own limited cognitive flexibility. Mind you. And not with their own failure to bridge neurological difference. No. The problem must be us, but it gets even more twisted because when the researchers asked neurotypical procedures why they disliked autistic targets. The answers revealed something profound about projection, prejudice, and the cruelest irony in neurodiversity research so what did these neurotypical perceivers say to justify why they disliked autistic targets? Remember? They didn't know these people were autistic, but they cited specific reasons. And what were those reasons? Well, the most common were first perceived awkwardness. Second, not wanting to talk to the person. And notably fourth on the list is the target's perceived lack of empathy. just sit with that for a moment. Neurotypical people who have just demonstrated a profound failure to accurately perceive autistic people who have just formed instant negative judgments based purely on superficial style differences, and who have just engaged in documented prejudice, accused autistic people of lacking empathy. For decades. Decades, autistic people have been told we lack. It's even in the diagnostic criteria, it's in the public imagination. It's this stereotype that won't die. Sheldon Cooper Rainman, the brilliant but emotionally cold savant. The person who can't read emotions can't connect and can't care, and here's what neurotypical people have done with that narrative. They have weaponized it. They use it to justify excluding us from social groups. They use it to dismiss our testimony about our own experiences, and they use it to explain away their discomfort with us as somehow it's our fault. But what if the empathy narrative is backwards? What if the neurotypical people have been projecting their own empathy failures onto us? And what if the research shows exactly that? There's a concept in autism research called the Double Empathy Problem. It was proposed by autistic scholar Damien Milton, and it is one of those ideas that once you understand it, you can't unsee it. I've talked about his scholarship before in previous episodes. The traditional view of autism suggests autistic people have a one-sided deficit, and that is that we struggle to understand neurotypical people. While neurotypical people have no trouble understanding each other, the double empathy problem says, you know what? Not so fast. What if empathy breakdowns in cross neurotype interactions go both ways. What if neurotypical people struggle just as much to understand autistic people as autistic? People struggle to understand neurotypical people. What if the deficit isn't in either group individually, but in the interface between neurological styles? And what if the research proves this? Because it does US studies measuring empathic accuracy. That is the ability to correctly identify what someone else is feeling. Show that neurotypical participants have significantly lower accuracy scores when trying to understand autistic people's emotions compared to understanding other neurotypical people's emotions. They literally cannot read us correctly. But here's the twist. When autistic people communicate with other autistic people, empathy flows naturally. Communication is reciprocal, and understanding is mutual. The breakdown happens specifically in mixed neurotype interactions. It's not just autistic people who get accused of lacking empathy research shows adults with A DHD are perceived as caring less about others' problems, which is another projection of neurotypical misunderstanding onto neurodivergent people. The pattern repeats itself. The majority struggles to understand the minority, but then blames the minority for that communication breakdown. So let me trace the logic here because this is where it gets infuriating. Neurotypical people struggle to accurately read autistic emotional expressions because they struggle. They experience confusion and discomfort, and they interpret that confusion as evidence that we are emotionally flat. Awkward, and here's the key phrase, lacking empathy. Then they use that misperception to justify instant dislike and social exclusion. And then they pinpoint to our social isolation as further evidence that we have social deficits. Do you see what's happening here? Neurotypical people's failure to understand us becomes reframed as our failure to be understandable. Their discomfort with difference becomes evidence of our deficiency. Their empathy failure becomes proof of ours. This is what philosophers call epistemic violence when your testimony about your own experience is systematically discounted because the dominant group cannot or will not understand you on your own terms. Now, let's talk about the other major justification neurotypical people gave for disliking autistic targets, and it was awkwardness. And I want to ask you a question that I think is actually kind of profound. Why does awkwardness matter so much? Think about it. When neurotypical perceivers decided whether they liked or disliked someone, they ranked awkwardness as more important than trustworthiness. Let that sink in. Neurotypical people considered whether someone was socially smooth, more important than whether they were trustworthy when deciding if they liked them, you could be a liar, a cheat, fundamentally untrustworthy. But if you're socially graceful, you're likable. You could be honest, brilliant, kind, but if you're awkward, you are disliked. I think this reveals something deeply uncomfortable about neurotypical social hierarchies. Awkwardness is threatening, not because it causes harm, but because it reveals the artifice of social performance. When someone doesn't follow the unwritten rules, doesn't maintain the expected eye contact rhythm, doesn't mirror body language and doesn't produce the anticipated vocal prosy. It disrupts the smooth functioning of neurotypical social scripts and that disruption creates anxiety. but here's what's crucial. That anxiety belongs to the neurotypical perceiver. It is their discomfort with unpredictability and their rigidity around social norms and their need for conformity. But the system we live in, a system that is designed by and for neurotypical people, reframes that discomfort as the neurodivergent person's problem. We are told to fix ourselves, mask ourselves, and contort ourselves into neurotypical shapes instead of the majority being asked to expand their tolerance for difference. And when we can't maintain that mask 24 7, because it's exhausting, because it's traumatic, because it's literally physically impossible, because we end up in a burnout and a collapse, we are blamed for the discomfort we cause. But what if? What if neurodivergent communities have a completely different relationship with awkwardness? Research by autistic scholar Brett Heman suggests that some autistic people actually view awkwardness positively as authenticity, as honesty, as freedom from oppressive social performance. So when autistic people interact with other autistic people, what neurotypical observers might code as awkward. That same behavior is experienced by the participants in the autistic group as genuine. So whose standards are we using here, and why is one group's comfort with ambiguity pathologized, while another group's anxiety about it becomes the enforced norm. Okay, so we've established that neurotypical people form instant negative judgments about neurodivergent people, that these judgments are based on style rather than substance, and that they justify these judgments with projections about empathy and anxiety about awkwardness. But here's the question that should haunt everyone listening. How does a split second cognitive bias become a lifetime of systematic exclusion? How does a seven second judgment scale into structural oppression? Because it does, and understanding that mechanism is crucial. individual prejudice is bad enough. But what makes neurotypical bias against neurodivergent people so pernicious is that it operates across multiple levels simultaneously, each level reinforcing the others, creating a self-sustaining system. Let me show you how this works. The foundation is neuron normative ideology and institutional power. At the base, we have two intertwined elements. The cultural belief that neurotypical ways of thinkings are correct and the formal systems that encode that belief. This ideology has historical roots in the late 18 hundreds. Statistician, Francis Galton. Yes. The eugenics guy applied statistical methods to human characteristics and created the concept of norming. If you fell outside the statistical norm, you were by definition, abnormal, deviant, and undesirable that conceptual move. Treating statistical rarity as inherent inferiority laid the groundwork for over a century of pathologizing difference, and that ideology gets encoded into formal systems, the medical model of disability. Diagnostic manuals that frame autism and A DHD as disorders, deficits and dysfunctions that comes from that ideology. Genetic research focused on prevention and cure rather than support and accommodations that comes from that ideology. Educational systems designed for neurotypical learning styles and workplaces that require neurotypical social performance or healthcare that prioritizes making neurodivergent people less different rather than supporting neurodivergent. Flourishing comes from that ideology. Every institution reinforces the message. You are the problem and you need to change. And what is the mechanism? Well, cognitive bias and social hierarchy. This is where thin sliced judgments live. Neurotypical people shaped by neuron normative ideology and institutional messaging develop rapid pattern recognition that codes neurodivergent behavior as wrong. And because these judgements happen in seconds before conscious reflection, before meaningful interaction, they function as gatekeepers. The bias prevents the very contact that could challenge that bias. Simultaneously. We see here social dominance theory at work. Societies create and maintain hierarchies where dominant groups control resources and privilege. Neurotypical people engage in what's called in-group favoritism. They preferentially allocate trust, likability, and opportunity to other neurotypical people, and they experience what's called intergroup anxiety. When encountering neurodivergent people and the stress that comes from unpredictable social interaction, that anxiety gets managed through avoidance. So they just don't engage. They don't hire us. They don't befriend us, and they don't invite us, and then they tell themselves it's because we are awkward or lack empathy and not because they are anxious and and flexible. And what is the outcome? Well, there's the structural exclusion. All of this culminates in what philosophers call epistemic injustice, systemic devaluation of neurodivergent people as knowers and testifiers of their own experiences In legal settings, autistic defendants get longer sentences because their neurotype emotional expressions are misread as a lack of remorse. In healthcare, autistic patients experience what researchers call the triple empathy problem. Clinicians don't understand them, they don't believe them, and they don't trust their self reports. And this leads to medical neglect, misdiagnosis and trauma. And in employment context, neurodivergent candidates are filtered out in interviews before they can even demonstrate their competence. And teachers form lower expectations of A DHD students based on diagnostic labels alone and not actual performance and gifted students deliberately underachieve to avoid peer rejection. The bias operates preemptively across every domain of life for every form of neurodivergence. Now, here's what makes the system so resistant to change. It's because each layer reinforces every other layer. There is a feedback loop. The ideology justifies the institution. The institutions create practices that reinforce cognitive biases, and these cognitive biases produce social hierarchies. The social hierarchies, in turn generate structural consequences and those structural consequences, unemployment, isolation, criminalization, get pointed to as evidence that the original ideology was correct. Can you see the circularity here? The system says neurodivergent people have poor outcomes. They are less successful, and that proves they have deficits. Except what you won't find is an explanation that the outcomes are produced by the system itself. If thin slice judgments prevent you from getting hired, and then unemployment is used as evidence that you lack work skills, or if social exclusion produced by neurotypical anxiety is reframed as evidence that you're socially deficient. And if your testimony about your own experience is systematically discounted, and then that's silencing is used as evidence that you cannot communicate. You're not in a meritocracy, you're in a cage, and the cage is invisible to the people who built it. So here we are trapped in a self-sustaining system of bias that operates faster than consciousness in scales from individual judgment to institutional oppression. And so the question becomes, can this system be dismantled? And if so, how? Because here's the thing about conceptual strongholds. These deeply embedded ideological systems that define marginalized groups as inherently inferior, they have been defeated before. And when we study how they were defeated, we find patterns, blueprints, and mechanisms that work. Let me give you three examples from history, three times where marginalized communities successfully destroyed the conceptual frameworks that oppressed them. And I'm going to show you not just what changed, but who made it change. Example one, the de medicalization of homosexuality. In 1952, the first diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders classified homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance. By 1968, it was sexual deviation. Psychiatry had the institutional authority to define who was sick and who was well, and they used that authority to pathologize an entire group. But activists didn't accept that framing. They protested. They disrupted a PA conferences, they forced confrontation. In 1973, the A PA voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM. That vote didn't happen in an empty room. It happened because activists like Barbara Giddings stood at the microphone and said, we are the experts on our own lives. It happened because Dr. Judd Marmer, a psychoanalyst stood before his peers and said, our theory is wrong. The evidence contradicts us, and we must change one conceptual shift, centuries of medicalization overturned. Now, it wasn't that simple. The concept morphed because ego dystonic homosexuality tried to survive by reframing the problem as distress about orientation rather than orientation itself. But by 1987 even that was gone. The conceptual stronghold was defeated. And what is the lesson here? When a concept is enshrined in an authoritative manual defeating, it requires forcing that authority to reverse its position through a combination of external pressure and internal scientific critique. Example two, the disability rights movement and the social model. For most of the 20th century disability was understood through the medical model. If you couldn't walk, you were broken. If you couldn't hear, you needed fixing the problem resided in the impaired body, the disability rights movement engineered a conceptual revolution. They introduced the social model of disability. The social model said, Hey, the problem isn't the wheelchair that I use. The problem is the building with no ramps, and the problem isn't the deaf person. The problem is the society that refuses to use sign language. The problem isn't the impairment. The problem is the environment's failure to accommodate it. One conceptual move externalizing the fault from the individual to the system, and that move changed everything That shift happened because people like Judy Hyman denied a teaching license because she used a wheelchair. Said no. She organized, she sat in federal buildings and she made them see that exclusion was a choice. Not an inevitability. Because once disability is understood as society's failure rather than individual deficiency, accommodation becomes a civil rights issue and not charity. That conceptual shift enabled the Americans with Disabilities Act. It enabled legal protections, employment rights, and educational access. And so what is the lesson here? Replacing a deficit model with a difference model, shifting the locus of the problem from the marginalized group to the dominant system, that is revolutionary. Example three. This is perhaps the most difficult to talk about the collapse of eugenics. Early 20th century, eugenics had it all, scientific legitimacy, legal infrastructure, popular support, and the US Supreme Court endorsed forced sterilization. An estimated 65,000 Americans were sterilized under eugenic laws. The ideology was based on Oversimplified genetics, like the belief that complex traits like intelligence and morality were determined by single genes that could be bred out of the population. What killed eugenics required two simultaneous attacks, moral repudiation. And here the association with Nazi atrocities made the ideology politically toxic worldwide and scientific invalidation. Advances in genetics proved the underlying science was wrong. Most traits are polygenic and are heavily influenced by the environment. And thus, quote, genetic improvement is a cultural value judgment, not objective. Science. Scientists like Herman Mueller, a geneticist who'd initially supported eugenics publicly recanted when he understood the implications and he said, we were wrong. The science does not support this, and we must stop. What is the lesson here? Concepts rooted in pseudoscience can be defeated by exposing both their moral bankruptcy and their empirical falseness. So what did these three victories have in common? One De Medicalization, removing the pathology label from authoritative diagnostic systems. Two deficit to difference. Reframing, shifting from what's wrong with them. Two, what's wrong with a system that excludes them? And three, scientific and moral refutation. Challenging both the empirical claims and the ethical frameworks. Four. Epistemic reclamation. Asserting that marginalized groups must be centered in conversations about their own lives. Nothing about us without us. And here's what should give everyone hope. The neurodiversity movement is deploying every single one of these strategies. Right now, we are challenging the pathology paradigm and asserting neurodivergence as identity difference, not medical tragedy. We are demanding neurodivergent leadership. In neurodiversity research. We are exposing the pseudoscience of cure focused genetic research and its eugenic implications, and we're proving that what looks like a social deficit is actually mutual communication breakdown. The double empathy problem. So the battle is underway, but the conceptual stronghold is under siege. now I know what some of you may be thinking. This all sounds overwhelming. Systemic, structural, individual prejudice reinforced by centuries of ideology and decades of institutional practice. How do we even begin to fight something that operates faster than consciousness? But here's where the research offers some genuinely hopeful insight knowledge works. Remember those thin slice judgements? The seven second verdicts, where neurotypical people instantly disliked neurodivergent people. Researchers test it. What happens when you give neurotypical perceivers information before they watch the videos? So when perceivers are told some of these people are autistic and given basic education about autism, what it is, how it affects communication, and why certain behaviors occurs, the bias disappeared. Not just reduced, but disappeared. In some cases, it even reversed itself. Neurotypical Perceivers who understood what autism was. Started rating autistic targets more favorably, seeing traits like directness and authenticity as positive rather than awkward. What is happening is cognitive override. The automatic bias still fires. That is hardwired pattern recognition, but conscious knowledge allows perceivers to recognize the bias as inaccurate and correct for it. They can say to themselves, I am experiencing discomfort, but that discomfort reflects my unfamiliarity with this communication style and not a deficit in this person. That cognitive move, that moment of epistemic humility changes everything. The same pattern holds for A DHD in giftedness. When teachers receive education about A DHD, their negative predictions about student success decrease. And when students learn about the stigma of giftedness, anti-intellectual attitudes reduce. now education isn't a complete solution. It doesn't dismantle structural ableism overnight, but it's a powerful intervention at the cognitive level. And that's where the seven second verdict happens. And what does this mean for us? For the listeners who are interested in these subjects, if you're neurodivergent autistic, A DHD, gifted A DHD, dyslexic, or any combination, and you've made it this far into the episode, I wanna talk directly to you for a moment. You have spent your life wondering what is wrong with you, why people seem uncomfortable around you, why friendships dissolve for reasons you can't name, why job interviews go poorly despite your qualifications and why you're told you're too much or not enough or difficult. Here's what I need you to hear. Nothing is wrong with you. The research we've discussed today doesn't show that neurodivergent people are deficient. It shows that neurotypical people have limited cognitive flexibility in the face of neurological difference. Their discomfort is real, but it's their discomfort. It belongs to them. It's produced by their own anxiety about unpredictable social interactions, their own attachment to conformity and their own failure to bridge cognitive difference you are not responsible for other people's biases. You are not obligated to contort yourself into neurotypical shapes to make them comfortable. You don't need to apologize for the way your neurology expresses itself in the world. Now, I'm not saying masking isn't sometimes necessary for survival. I know. I'm not saying disclosure decisions are simple. I know. I'm not saying you won't face consequences for refusing to accommodate neurotypical preferences. I know that too. This is still an ableist world and we still have to navigate it strategically and live within it. But understanding the mechanism of bias, understanding that it's a rapid, automatic, and rooted in neurotypical cognitive limitations rather than neurodivergent deficits, that knowledge can shift your internal narrative from what's wrong with me to, I encountered systematic bias from I failed to the system, failed me from internalized shame to justified anger. And that cognitive shift is genuinely liberating. And if you're neurotypical and you're an ally and you're listening here and you don't identify as a neurodivergent, I need you to sit with me with something uncomfortable. You have biases you didn't choose. We all do. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine and it makes errors. The question isn't whether you have these biases. The research proves you do. The question is, what do you do when you learn about them? Because the research shows that you automatically form negative judgements about neurodivergent people within seconds. You might not be aware of it. You probably don't even intend to, but it happens. Now you have a choice about what to do with that information. You can get defensive, you can insist that you are not like that. You can argue that you treat everyone fairly or. You can recognize that bias operates beneath your conscious awareness and commit to actively overriding it. And here's what that looks like in practice. When you meet someone and experience discomfort or social awkwardness, pause for a moment and ask yourself, is this person actually problematic or am I experiencing anxiety because their communication style differs from mine? When you're conducting job interviews and someone doesn't make typical eye contact or uses an unexpected body language, consciously remind yourself. Different communication styles do not indicate lower competence. And when you hear someone described as awkward or weird or off, ask yourself off from what? Weird compared to whom and what's the actual harm being done here? I invite you to cultivate what philosophers call virtuous testimonial sensibility. And that is the trained capacity to perceive others with justice rather than prejudice. Listen to neurodivergent people's self reports about their own experiences, even when those reports contradict your assumptions. Read Neurodivergent authored work. Follow Neurodivergent Advocates Center neurodivergent voices in conversations about neurodivergence and critically teach this to others. Especially if you're an educator, an employer, a parent, or a healthcare provider, you have the power to interrupt the seven second verdict in others by providing the educational context that overrides that bias. The seven second verdict doesn't have to be final, but changing it requires acknowledging that it exists, and that acknowledgement, that's the first step towards dismantling the entire system. So here we are at the end of an episode about judgements that happen in Seven Seconds Systems that took centuries to build and transformations that are happening right now. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this. The bias is real. It's measured. It's documented, but it's also mutable. Knowledge changes minds understanding, interrupts prejudice, and education overrides automatic bias. For my neurodivergent listeners, you are not imagining it. You are accurately perceiving a documented phenomenon and understanding the mechanism does not erase the harm, but it can transform how you make sense of your experiences. And for my neurotypical listeners, you have cognitive biases you didn't choose and probably don't want, but you can choose to override them. That choice repeated across millions of interactions is how systems change. The neurodiversity movement isn't asking for tolerance or pity. We are demanding that society recognize neurological difference as a human variation and not human deficiency. We are demanding that the seven second verdict be overridden by conscious knowledge. We are demanding that the architecture of oppression be replaced by an architecture of inclusion, and we're not waiting for permission. Here's my challenge to you. Whether you're neurodivergent or neurotypical this week, catch yourself making a thin slice judgment. Notice when you decide you like or dislike someone within seconds. Notice when you code someone as awkward or weird, and then ask yourself, what am I actually reacting to? Harm or difference? That moment of recognition, that's where system change begins. I. Now, here's where you can support this work. This is original research that took a long time to put together. First, share this episode. Send it to someone who needs to hear it, whether that's a neurodivergent person seeking validation, or a neurotypical person ready for uncomfortable truths. Second, please rate and review the show on whatever platform you're listening. Those reviews help other people find us, and this work only matters if people actually hear it. Third, if you have the financial means, support us by buying me a cup of coffee on my website, neuro rebel podcast.com. The links are on the show notes. Independent researchers like myself, requires independent funding and every contribution, whether it's$3 or 30, helps us keep producing episodes without advertisers or sponsors dictating our content. Thank you for listening to Neuro Rebel. Remember, every episode of Neuro Rebel is produced in both English and Spanish. Because liberation is not limited by language. The Spanish version of this episode will be available within two days. You can find us on all major podcast platforms and on our website@neurorebelpodcast.com and on social media when I'm most active on TikTok and Instagram, full transcripts and details, show notes with all research citations are always available on my website. Until next time, trust your perception. Challenge the system and remember that your neurodivergent brain isn't broken. The world that can't accommodate you is, this is Anita. Keep Rebell.