The double empathy problem aka why people ‘hate’ us. Or do they?

How many times have you found yourself in the position where someone you know approaches you and suddenly the phrase ‘don’t fuck up now’ immediately lights up in your head like a flashing neon sign? And yet you do. And what is worse, it seems as if time slows down while you are, as per usually, awkwardly interacting with this person, with plenty of it left for you to be able to simultaneously think: ‘I hate my autism’, while trying to appear and act like a ‘normal’ person.

The diagnostic criteria for autism include a deficit in social interaction and communication with others. It has been believed for years that autistic individuals lack empathy and find it difficult to put themselves in the position of others or predict their behaviour (impaired theory of mind). Nobody can doubt that autistic people often struggle to understand the emotions and thinking processes of neurotypical people. But if there is such a thing as an impaired theory of mind? Shouldn’t they have the same problems when interacting with fellow autistic individuals? Could it be that this is a two-way issue caused by both sides’ difficulties in understanding each other? A communication break down, perhaps? This idea was first expressed by Damian Milton in 2012 who named it ‘the double empathy problem’. The theory suggests that when people with different communication styles and world perception interact with one another, they often fail to communicate successfully and as a result they are unable to feel empathy for each other. This is likely to get worse through differences in language use and comprehension which is why neurotypicals often form negative first impressions of autistic people.

A recent study by Catherine J. Crompton et al, sheds a little bit more light on the issue. The participants of this study formed eight-person chains, where either all participants were autistic, all were neurotypical or four were autistic and four neurotypical in an alternated manner in the chain, starting with a non-autistic participant. Next, a researcher read a fictional story to the first participant and after they left the room, the second participant entered it and got to listen to the story as told by the first participant. This process continued to the eighth participant who had to recount the story aloud. The final scores reflected the number of story details the participants managed to pass on to the next person in the chain. After completing the experiment, the participants also had to report their feelings of rapport towards their neighbouring participants regarding enjoyment, success, friendliness and awkwardness. Unlike what the supporters of the theory of mind would expect, in this study the autistic participants recalled information shared by autistic peers as effectively as neurotypical participants recalled information shared by their neurotypical peers. However, information sharing was found to be much poorer in the mixed chains. These deficits in information transfer within the mixed groups also came hand in hand with worse feeling of rapport scores.

The study clearly adds evidence to support the double empathy problem theory. We have different ways of communicating and perhaps we express empathy in different ways, something that comes across as a lack of empathy to neurotypical people and could have all along been a matter of misunderstanding! Non-autistic people might be making incorrect assumptions about autistic people because they are reading between the lines too much after all. Therefore, it is more about how autistic people appear and sound, and not what they talk about (but maybe how they phrase things?), that leads non-autistic people to judge and avoid autistic people. Sadly, this means that autistic people might have fewer opportunities to make friends or find and maintain jobs because of the negative first impressions others form about them. This lack of understanding and stigma felt by autistic people has a negative impact on their mental health, employment, education opportunities and also on experiences with the justice system.

But what is all this if not another example of the tyranny of the majority? What most people feel, think or do, is considered as the norm and everyone else has to adjust to this reality. Neurotypicals do not expect themselves to understand or learn autistic perspectives, although autistic people work hard to adjust to what the majority dictates all their lives. This is where I think the problem lies though. In order to shake off the society’s prejudices once more, we need to embrace the fact that majority does not equal normal and vice versa. This is not just about a human instinct, an excuse with an evolutionary coating that we cannot ever overcome , but a cultural construction, a prejudice that can be fought and eradicated . The authors of the above study have this great idea that they share with us in their article: to repeat the same experiment with children instead of adults! If this future study shows that neurotypical children are more accepting of autistic children or that they communicate better with them than neurotypical adults accept or communicate with their autistic peers, it would mean that negative attitudes towards autistic individuals are not hard wired in our brains, but instead they are learned over time. The researchers also believe that often and positive interaction between autistic and non-autistic children/people can potentially help autistic and non-autistic individuals to better understand each other and eventually help ameliorate the double empathy problem. This doesn’t come as a surprise though, since In order to embrace the different and live harmoniously with each other, the solution has always been fighting ignorance first. And what better way to do this than bringing different people together? Awareness could make the need evident to most and when people are ready to take the next step, that step could be something simple as a concept, but extremely difficult to implement : clear and honest verbal and written communication. Is this too much to ask? Yes, I think we can all be bothered.