For decades, the standard explanation for social difficulty between autistic and non-autistic people put the entire burden of misunderstanding on one side of the conversation. The autistic person, the theory went, lacked the ability to read social cues correctly. In 2012, autistic researcher Damian Milton published an idea that quietly reorganized the whole framework: what if the difficulty isn’t a deficit in one person, but a mismatch between two different ways of communicating, with both sides equally bad at reading the other?
What the double empathy problem actually claims
Milton’s argument is straightforward once stated plainly. Autistic and non-autistic people often have genuinely different communication styles, expectations around eye contact, tone, directness, and pacing. When two people from the same communication culture interact, mutual understanding tends to flow fairly easily. When an autistic person interacts with a non-autistic person, both parties are working across a communication gap — and both make interpretation errors as a result, not just one.
This reframes a familiar assumption almost completely. The old model implied that two autistic people talking to each other would struggle the most, since both supposedly lacked the skill of reading social cues. The double empathy problem predicts the opposite, and research has generally supported it: autistic people frequently report communicating more smoothly and comfortably with other autistic people than with non-autistic people, because the communication styles match.
Non-autistic misreading goes largely unnoticed
One of the sharper implications of this idea is how invisible non-autistic misreading of autistic communication tends to be, simply because the non-autistic interpretation is treated as the default correct one. Autistic directness gets read as rudeness. Autistic intensity around a topic of genuine interest gets read as social inappropriateness. A flat or different vocal tone gets read as disinterest or hostility, even when the autistic speaker is genuinely engaged and enthusiastic. None of these are objectively correct readings — they’re just readings from one particular cultural lens, treated as universal.
Why this matters beyond academic theory
This isn’t just a semantic reframe with no practical consequence. If social difficulty is genuinely two-directional, then social skills training that targets only the autistic person — teaching eye contact, teaching scripted small talk, teaching neurotypical-style turn-taking — is addressing exactly half of a two-sided problem. The other half, teaching non-autistic people to interpret autistic communication styles more accurately, almost never appears in any formal curriculum, despite carrying equal responsibility for the misunderstanding.
Workplaces, schools, and families that take the double empathy problem seriously tend to shift their approach noticeably: rather than asking only the autistic person to adapt entirely toward neurotypical norms, they build genuine two-way understanding, training colleagues, teachers, or family members to recognize and interpret autistic communication patterns accurately, alongside any skill-building offered to the autistic person themselves.
It doesn’t deny real differences exist
The double empathy problem isn’t a claim that autistic and non-autistic communication styles are identical, or that no genuine differences exist worth understanding. It’s a claim about where responsibility for the resulting misunderstanding sits. Differences are real and worth naming clearly. Fault for the resulting confusion, under this framework, belongs to the gap between two different styles meeting each other, not to a deficiency located entirely in one party.
What this looks like in practice
A workplace that trains managers to recognize that a direct, blunt email from an autistic colleague isn’t necessarily hostile, just differently styled, is applying the double empathy problem practically, even without naming it. A teacher who learns that a student’s flat tone during a presentation doesn’t indicate disengagement is doing the same. Small shifts like these distribute the adjustment work more fairly across both sides of an interaction, rather than asking one side to carry the entire burden of translation.
For more on related communication theory that’s reshaped how autism gets understood publicly, see our piece on why the word spectrum is so often misunderstood. And for a practical look at how this plays out specifically in adult workplaces, our piece on disclosure at work covers similar two-directional misunderstanding in a professional setting.
Laura Mitchell’s recent release Where Autism Meets the World opens with an extended discussion of the double empathy problem and its global implications. While that title makes its way to Amazon, her current book Navigating Life as an Autistic Adult covers related communication theory with a practical, day-to-day focus.
