Week 57: What If Autistic People Aren’t the Ones Misunderstanding?
For most of my life, whenever autism came up in conversation, there was an assumption hiding beneath almost every discussion.
Autistic people struggle to understand non-autistic people.
It sounds reasonable. It’s one of the most common explanations of autism. Social difficulties, communication differences, trouble interpreting social cues — all of these are often described as problems that exist primarily within the autistic person.
But a few months ago, I came across a research idea that completely changed the way I thought about this.
It’s called the Double Empathy Problem, a theory proposed by autism researcher Damian Milton.
The basic idea is surprisingly simple:
What if communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people aren’t caused by one group failing to understand the other?
What if both groups are struggling to understand each other?
At first, this sounds obvious. Of course communication requires two people. But the implications are much bigger than they seem.
For decades, autism research often approached social differences from a one-sided perspective. Researchers would measure how well autistic individuals interpreted facial expressions, understood social situations, or responded to conversational cues. When performance differed from non-autistic participants, the conclusion was often that autistic people had a deficit in social understanding.
But the Double Empathy Problem asks a different question:
How well do non-autistic people understand autistic people?
Suddenly, the situation looks very different.
I thought about all the kids I’ve worked with over the past year.
Many times, I initially misunderstood what they were doing.
I interpreted silence as disengagement.
I interpreted repetitive behavior as distraction.
I interpreted certain reactions as stubbornness or lack of interest.
And then, after spending more time with them, I realized I was wrong.
The misunderstanding wasn’t happening in only one direction.
It was happening in both directions.
I wasn’t automatically understanding them any more than they were automatically understanding me.
The difference was that society tends to treat non-autistic communication as the default.
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If an autistic child fails to interpret a social cue, we notice immediately.
If a non-autistic adult completely misinterprets an autistic child’s behavior, we often don’t recognize it as a misunderstanding at all.
The burden of adaptation usually falls on one side.
What fascinated me most about this theory is that recent research has started supporting parts of it. Some studies have found that autistic individuals often communicate surprisingly well with other autistic individuals. Likewise, non-autistic individuals often communicate most easily with other non-autistic individuals.
The communication breakdown appears strongest when people with very different communication styles interact.
That doesn’t sound like a deficit.
It sounds like a mismatch.
And honestly, that idea felt familiar.
We accept this concept in almost every other context.
People from different cultures misunderstand each other.
People from different generations misunderstand each other.
People speaking different first languages misunderstand each other.
We don’t usually assume one side is inherently worse at communication.
We recognize that communication depends on shared assumptions.
Maybe autism works similarly.
Maybe some of what we call “social deficits” are actually differences in communication frameworks.
That doesn’t mean autism doesn’t come with real challenges. It does.
But it changes where we look for solutions.
Instead of asking, “How do we teach autistic people to communicate like everyone else?”
We might ask:
“How do we help both sides understand each other better?”
The more time I spend working with autistic children and adults, the more I think that second question is the more interesting one.
Because understanding has never been a one-person job.
And maybe empathy isn’t about imagining what someone else feels.
Maybe it’s about recognizing that their way of experiencing the world might be fundamentally different from your own — and being curious enough to learn it anyway.
