When Predictability Becomes a Compass: Autistic Reasoning and the Pull of Uncertainty
When Data Meets Desire for Certainty
In a new study from the University of Bath, Mark Brosnan and colleagues suggest a deceptively simple formula: autistic traits plus intolerance of uncertainty equal greater deliberation. The idea sounds technical. Its implications run deeper. It points to something autistic people have long known — deliberation is not hesitation, it’s defense.
Their Dual Process Theory of Autism argues that autistic people tend to rely less on intuition and more on careful reasoning. Adding “intolerance of uncertainty” as the hinge, they show that a drive for predictability fully explains the shift toward deliberation. What they call mediation, many of us might call adaptation. It’s a subtle but important distinction — one that changes the story from deficit to design.
Predictability as Protection
As Brosnan et al. write, participants with higher autistic traits showed a “greater propensity for deliberation fully mediated by intolerance of uncertainty.” That line captures the heart of their argument — a statistical link that doubles as a metaphor for lived experience.
Translated out of statistics: what the model calls “mediation by uncertainty” looks, in real life, like slowing the world down until it makes sense. In daily life, uncertainty can feel like pain. The study’s “desire for predictability” describes more than cognition — it captures how autistic minds steady themselves against volatility. Deliberation becomes not a flaw to fix but a way of making sense in environments that rarely make sense back. It’s what you might call predictability-oriented cognition — a reasoning style that steadies perception through structure.
The authors stay measured. There’s no coercive agenda, no talk of correction. Yet the framing still treats autistic reasoning as data rather than narrative, as something to be observed instead of lived. It’s careful work that stops one step short of autistic partnership. The question that lingers is not whether the findings are valid, but whether the frame can evolve beyond measurement into meaning.
Between Coping and Correction
At the edges, this line of research often feeds into programs designed to “cope with uncertainty.” On paper that sounds helpful. In practice, such programs can drift — from easing distress to disciplining difference. Reducing anxiety is care. Training intuition into autistic people who’ve learned to distrust it is control. This is the line every “coping” program must guard carefully: whether it aims to soothe uncertainty or erase the protective adaptations built around it.
Still, Brosnan and colleagues name uncertainty as central to autistic life and refuse the usual deficit framing. They don’t treat deliberation as pathology. They recognize it as reasoning under pressure — a cognitive shelter, not a malfunction. But they also stop short of letting autistic people define what deliberation means, leaving interpretation in academic hands.
What the Study Almost Said:
The data show that predictability drives deliberation. The same data, read differently, show that deliberation creates predictability — that autistic reasoning slows the world until it can be faced. If uncertainty activates our deliberation, it’s because the world keeps changing the rules on us. The study catches that rhythm without quite realizing it: deliberation as an act of grounding, not avoidance.
That’s the story beneath the statistics. Autistic cognition doesn’t reject intuition; it filters it, tests it and only trusts it when the pattern holds. To call that “reduced intuition” misses the point. It’s not a lack. It’s calibration.
Why It Matters
For autism research, that means predictability isn’t a variable to minimize — it’s the mechanism that makes adaptation possible. Every step away from coercive framing matters. Studies like this one document difference without moralizing it. They replace the language of correction with the language of observation, leaving space for reinterpretation. That space — if occupied by autistic voices — becomes protection.
The more we read studies like this on our own terms, the more we shift what counts as knowledge about autism. Brosnan et al. show that predictability is not an obstacle to reasoning but the reason itself. And maybe that’s what the field still needs to learn: that certainty, for us, isn’t rigidity. It’s relief. Predictability becomes a compass, not a cage.