Even Russell and Chris Chan must understand other people have thoughts because they know people disagree with them. It would take a much more seriously handicapped person to not understand other people have thoughts when you talk to other people or read things other people write.
Chris understands that other people have thoughts only in the simplest sense, that they have an organ called the brain and it does thinking like his does. But it doesn't go further than that. Chris thinks that anything that's apparent to him must be apparent to everyone else. He has immense difficulty imagining other perspectives exist.
When people disagree with him, Chris thinks they're either stupid or they know better and they're just being deliberately cruel.
The standard test for theory of mind involves puppets, where you have puppet A hide a marble under, say, a hat, then puppet A leaves the room. Then have puppet B move the marble elsewhere. Then you bring puppet A back into the room. You ask the test subject where puppet A would look for the marble. People like Chris would say puppet A would look
under the hat where puppet B moved the marble to.
Even if you really pester someone like Chris to think hard about it, and really give them an opportunity to think about it, they will often fail this test.
Scale this problem up and expose someone like CWC unsupervised to a malicious crowd of internet dipshits (like myself, when I was a young man), and you get the contents of the CWCki.
I think Russ probably isn't as bad as Chris. He's probably more blinded by his emotions, rage, horniness, and raging horniness, that he simply doesn't calm down long enough to think about other people. I get the feeling that it's less a cognitive disorder with him, and he's just a selfish shit.
But I wouldn't be surprised if he's got a touch of the 'tism too.
Edit: oops, I got it backwards, yeah the correct answer is under the hat, not where it was moved to.
