Many adolescents with autism prefer to interact with autistic peers over non-autistic ones. Autistic people report feeling more comfortable with other autistic people than with non-autistic people. There are other signs that people on the spectrum connect well with one another. It’s only in mixed groups of autistic and non-autistic people that the message quickly degrades.
For example, in the game of “telephone,” in which a message is relayed in whispers from one person to the next, chains of eight autistic people maintain the fidelity of the message just as well as sets of eight non-autistic people do. Yes, plenty of evidence shows that people with autism differ from those without the condition across several social domains, such as facial expressions, speech patterns and eye gaze (though the last notion may be shaky).īut a number of studies also show that autistic people’s social and communication issues are not evident when they interact with other people with autism. For example, non-autistic people may be prone to having negative first impressions of autistic people without knowing their diagnosis - rating them less approachable and more awkward than neurotypical people - or to misjudging them as deceptive.īut aren’t social difficulties a core trait of autism ? Non-autistic people may also make snap judgements of autistic people that prevent, curtail or sour interactions between the two. Other work shows that non-autistic individuals struggle to accurately interpret autistic people’s facial expressions. For example, in one study, non-autistic people had trouble deciphering the mental states autistic people portrayed through animations. The results hint that non-autistic people’s blind spots contribute to the communication gap. Instead of focusing on how people with autism perform in social situations, new studies probe how non-autistic people perform when interacting with autistic people. For him, the idea offered a way to reframe the long-held notion that individuals on the spectrum have impaired theory of mind - the ability to infer the intentions or feelings of others - to include potential misunderstanding by non-autistic people.
Milton first coined the term ‘ double empathy problem’ in a 2012 paper. Autistic activists such as Jim Sinclair have argued since the 1990s that autistic modes of communication conflict with neurotypical ones. This conception of social issues in autism as a two-way street is decades old. For example, difficulty in reading the other person’s facial expressions may stunt conversations between autistic and non-autistic people. The problem, the theory posits, is mutual. In the case of autism, a communication gap between people with and without the condition may occur not only because autistic people have trouble understanding non-autistic people but also because non-autistic people have trouble understanding them. The greater the disconnect, the more difficulty the two people will have interacting. This disconnect can occur at many levels, from conversation styles to how people see the world. The basis of the theory is that a mismatch between two people can lead to faulty communication. “The double empathy problem is a younger theory empirically,” he says. And not all researchers are tuned in to this new direction, says Matthew Lerner, associate professor of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics at Stony Brook University in New York. “As a theory, it matches autistic phenomenology coming from insider accounts,” says autistic researcher Damian Milton, lecturer in developmental and intellectual disabilities at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.Īlthough scientific support for the theory is building, it is not yet rock solid. It also echoes principles of neurodiversity in its assumption that autistic people simply have a different way of communicating rather than a deficient one. This ‘double problem’ challenges long-held theories of autism that point to social shortcomings of people with autism as the reason interactions flop. Proponents of an idea called the ‘double empathy problem’ believe that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people are a two-way issue, caused by both parties’ difficulties in understanding.
This defining trait of the condition has informed prevailing theories of its roots as well as the design of many autism treatments.īut an emerging line of work supports a more nuanced look at the social abilities of autistic people. Difficulty navigating social interactions pervades even the earliest accounts of autism.
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