Autism and double empathy: when two people don't experience the same interaction

A clinician asks a simple question.

“How are you feeling today?”

The autistic person stays silent for a few seconds. Their gaze moves away.

In that silence, several interpretations already appear.

For the observer, the silence may suggest emotional difficulty, relational withdrawal, perhaps a form of shutting down. The averted gaze may be read as avoidance or as a lack of engagement in the exchange.

For the autistic person, the scene may mean something entirely different.

The question may require clarification: are we talking about an emotional state? A physical one? This exact moment, or the whole day?

The gaze may move away not to avoid the relationship, but to support concentration or reduce sensory overload.

The observable behaviour is the same.

But the interpretive frameworks used to make sense of it are not.

It is often in that quiet space that misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people begin.

Double empathy: empathy is not always one-way

For a long time, the relational difficulties associated with autism were interpreted mainly through the idea of an empathy deficit.

That reading draws in particular on work around theory of mind, which highlighted certain differences in how autistic people may infer the mental states of others.

Another reading of these phenomena has since developed.

In 2012, the researcher Damian Milton introduced the concept of double empathy to describe a frequently observed reality: misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people can be reciprocal.

In other words, the difficulty is not located on one side of the relationship only. Both people may struggle to correctly interpret the other's intentions, signals or communicative priorities.

This perspective shifts the focus.

The problem no longer sits inside the individual, but in the encounter between two ways of functioning.

The implicit frames of interaction

Every human interaction rests on implicit frames.

These frames shape how we interpret what happens in a given situation: what is expected, what seems appropriate, what feels strange or, on the contrary, normal.

The sociologist Erving Goffman showed that social life relies heavily on these shared interactional frames. In ordinary situations, people coordinate their behaviour through implicit rules about eye contact, conversational tempo, posture or emotional expression.

These rules are rarely stated explicitly. They are learned gradually, through immersion in a given social environment.

When widely shared, they allow communication to flow.

But when two people draw on different frames, the situation becomes more fragile.

We never interpret behaviour in itself. We always interpret it through a frame.

Autistic communication: information or social coordination?

These mismatches appear especially clearly in language use.

In many social interactions, language does not only convey information. It also plays a role of relational coordination.

It can signal an intention, mark implicit belonging to the frame of the exchange, or maintain a certain fluidity in the conversation.

For many autistic people, language use can be oriented more directly towards the information itself: accuracy of content, logical consistency, clarity of the message.

This difference is not, in itself, a problem.

The difficulty appears when one of these modes is treated as the only legitimate frame of interpretation.

An information-oriented message may then be perceived as abrupt, distant or unusual — not because of its content, but because it does not carry the social markers expected in that situation.

The misunderstanding does not necessarily come from an inability to communicate.

Sometimes it simply comes from the absence of translation between different communicative logics.

Interpretive friction

These situations can be described as moments of interpretive friction.

Interpretive friction appears when two people observe the same behaviour but do not use the same frame to make sense of it.

• A silence can be read as relational withdrawal or as processing time.
• An averted gaze can be read as avoidance or as sensory regulation.
• A direct answer can be perceived as rigidity or as a search for precision.

When the frames stay invisible, the misunderstanding is usually attributed to the person.

• Silence becomes withdrawal.
• Precision becomes rigidity.
• Sensory regulation becomes avoidance.

What is in fact a mismatch of frames is then interpreted as a flaw in the individual.

A familiar phenomenon in professional practice

In many clinical, educational or social settings, these mismatches occur regularly.

A professional may feel that a patient is not responding, that a student is not cooperating, or that an adult seems distant.

In some cases, this is not a refusal of relationship.

It may be a moment where two different interpretive frames meet without being recognised as such.

Acknowledging this possibility does not mean giving up clinical observation.

On the contrary, it helps distinguish what belongs to the person's functioning from what belongs to the frame through which the situation is being interpreted.

And in the workplace?

These mechanisms obviously do not disappear when we walk through the door of a company.

They may even become particularly significant, because working life rests on a considerable number of rules that are never really stated.

A manager might ask, for example:

“Could you take a quick look at this?”

The sentence sounds simple.

Yet it potentially contains several pieces of implicit information: how much priority should it be given? What does “quick” mean? Is this a request or a suggestion? Which work should be interrupted to deal with it?

When that information is implicitly shared, communication works.

When it is not, each person may build a different interpretation of the situation.

The manager may then perceive a lack of autonomy, a difficulty prioritising or a form of rigidity, where the employee is simply trying to obtain the information needed to answer the request precisely.

Conversely, a direct answer or a request for clarification from an autistic employee can be read as pushback, inflexibility or defensiveness, when it simply aims to make the situation more explicit.

It is exactly the same interpretive friction.

And this is probably one of the key issues in managing autistic people at work: learning to distinguish observable behaviour from the interpretation we attach to it.

Managing an autistic person therefore does not necessarily mean inventing a new way of communicating.

It can start much more simply: making visible the rules we assumed were universal.

What autism reveals about human communication

Autism does not create these interpretive mismatches.

It simply makes them more visible.

In many ordinary social situations, interactional frames are largely shared. Differences of interpretation exist, but they often remain limited.

When two more distant ways of functioning meet, those differences become far more perceptible.

Autism then acts as a revealer of the implicit mechanisms that structure human communication: unstated expectations, rules of social legibility, emotional norms and tacit coordination of behaviour.

This is also what makes these questions particularly interesting for management.

Understanding autistic communication is not only about learning to communicate better with one particular group of employees. It also forces us to look at the implicit rules underlying our own way of communicating.

Shifting the focus

Perhaps the question is not only:

Why do some autistic people find it hard to make themselves legible in interactions?

But also:

To what extent are our interpretive frames able to accommodate different ways of being present?

This question matters in a consultation, in a relationship, in a classroom.

It matters just as much around a meeting table.

Because sometimes the difficulty is not communicating.

It is simply that we are speaking from frames we cannot see.

Going further

These mechanisms of communication and interpretation have very concrete consequences at work: feedback, meetings, prioritisation, unspoken rules, overload, and the relationship between managers and their teams.

They are among the topics developed in my Guide to managing autistic people at work