Have you seen that awesome TEDx talk by Jac den Houting? I’ll just leave it right here for you…
Jac talks about two pieces of academic work that I really wanted to know more about:
1) the ‘double empathy problem’ and
2) the ‘telephone game’ research.
It was a mildly-challenging feat, but I tracked down links for both pieces. You can find the double empathy problem here and the telephone game here if you’d like to read them for yourself.
The Double Empathy Problem
Also known as “On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’”
“both autistic and neurotypical people have deficits when interacting with each other”
The ‘double empathy problem’ is a reframing of autism as just another variant of humanity; whereas now autism is classified as ‘abnormal’ and ‘pathological’ as compared to the neurotypical majority (if you want more detail on common terms in the used in neurodiversity, check out this post). The author, Damian Milton, points out that this may originate in the idea that groups have a tendency to other those who are different, often in order to avoid confronting problematic behavior and biases within themselves or the group culture and instead placing the blame for discomfort upon the othered individual. He points out that autistic people in particular deviate from the majority, and are often deemed things like ‘weird’, ‘disordered’, and ‘incomprehensible’ in their motivations and behaviors. He challenges the diagnostic criteria of autism as primarily deficits, instead proposing that both autistic and neurotypical people have deficits when interacting with each other (check this link for the DSM-5’s Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnostic criteria).
“The ‘double empathy problem’ is a reframing of autism as just another variant of humanity; whereas now autism is classified as ‘abnormal’ and ‘pathological’ as compared to the neurotypical majority”
The double empathy problem itself describes a disconnect between two individuals trying to relate and communicate, a gap that grows wider as backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives become more and more different.
Milton explains that people have a certain expectation for a person’s behaviors and attitudes in a social setting, and neurotypical and autistic people may have totally different social expectations.
Many social actions that neurotypical people consider harmless and acceptable may be uncomfortable, or even traumatic, for autistic individuals. There can be a potentially huge disconnect in social expectations between two people.
As a note, I’m going to call the ability to understand another’s social expectations ‘social empathy’ for the purposes of this article. So disregard any other meaning the phrase social empathy might have to you for the duration of this article, and know that I’m talking about ‘the ability to understand another person’s social expectations in social situations’.
“At a glance, this finding does seem to support the idea that autistic individuals aren’t necessarily impaired in social communication. There does seem to be a disconnect between how neurotypical and autistic individuals communicate with those in the other neurotype, while both groups communicate similarly within their own neurotype.”
In the worst case (no statistical differences between groups), this research might be saying that we’re not all that (statistically) different!
Closing Thoughts
The telephone game research is still in production, and I’m not sure what other support is out there for the double empathy problem – though I am looking (the INSAR conferences have some lovely work). I would suggest a future direction for the telephone game – nonverbal autistic people, who can often communicate with a keyboard of some sort, were not involved in the study (so far as I can tell). Trying to replicate this work while incorporating written and spoken communication with both verbal and nonverbal participants would be a great addition.
The authors of the telephone game research also plan on studying the social empathy and rapport between storytelling pairs and exploring differences in scores between pairs in each of the chains with the videos they collected. I look forward to sharing the article I hope is making its way to publication.
Overall, the double empathy problem makes sense to me as an autistic adult. This and other work I’ve been reading excites me. I personally believe that solutions to our communication differences will more likely come from working together to bridge these gaps – rather than pathologizing a group for being different.
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