The Double Empathy Problem: a mutual adaptation frame

If miscommunication between autistic and non-autistic people is mutual (a culture clash, not an autistic deficit) then half of what most workplaces try to fix is aimed at the wrong person. This is the single most important shift in the course.

The dominant story about autism at work, for decades, has been a deficit story. The autistic person 'lacks social skills', 'struggles with communication', 'doesn't pick up on cues'. The implied fix: coach the autistic person to behave more neurotypically. Many corporate autism programs still operate on this premise.

In 2012, an autistic sociologist named Damian Milton proposed a different theory. He argued that miscommunication between autistic and non-autistic people is not one-directional. Both sides struggle to read each other. Non-autistic people misread autistic body language, tone, and directness just as autistic people misread non-autistic indirection, small talk, and ambiguity. He called it the Double Empathy Problem.

In the years since, a research literature has built up around the idea. The most important workplace synthesis came in 2024, when Szechy, Turk, and O'Donnell published 'The Double Empathy Problem and Autistic Employment Challenges' in Autism in Adulthood. Their argument: most autistic employment challenges are not individual deficits. They are systemic mismatches between autistic communication preferences and the implicit norms of mostly-neurotypical workplaces. The fix is mutual adaptation, not unilateral coaching of the autistic worker.

What does this change in practice?

• If a meeting goes badly, you stop asking 'what should the autistic person have done differently?' and you start asking 'what was the meeting's design assuming?'
• If a project clarifying question lands as 'rude', you stop coaching directness out of the asker and you start asking why your team can't receive a literal question without coding it as social aggression.
• If a 1:1 keeps going off the rails, you stop characterizing the report as 'hard to read' and you start writing the 1:1 down in advance so neither of you has to guess.

Anti-deficit doesn't mean there are no real challenges. It means we stop locating all of them in one person.