Double empathy is a term coined in 2012 by Damian Milton to describe the difficulty in communication between NT people and autistic people.

The idea is that the cognitive structure for NT people are similar to each other and the structure for autistic people are similar to each other. Each group interfaces well with people from their own group, but less well between groups. Effectively the groups use different social languages and it forces each group to notice this and translate back and forth. The Theory of Mind is working, but differently – they aren’t modeling each other correctly. This can lead to miscommunication and mental fatigue. This double empathy problem tends to be lopsided: NT people, being the majority, expect others to conform to their point of view. Autistic people use Masking to act and sound like NT people, which adds additional mental load.

My Experience

Due to my lack of Social Salience I often don’t even notice we are talking different languages. Technically I can’t experience double empathy: I operate on explicit language only. I do not receive social signals, nor do I broadcast them. However, my lack of broadcast can be perceived by NT people as signal of “don’t care” or “hostility”.

For NT people interacting with me, they experience the double empathy problem and I am not aware of it. A concrete example: I went to a party with my wife and brought a book in case I got bored. As expected, I got bored, so I sat in the corner and read my book. Much later my wife told me that people were offended by my behavior. They thought I was angry with them (or something). I couldn’t believe it – why would they make something up (and totally false at that) and then believe it? It had to be a lie (this is Stage 1 of my history when I didn’t know about NT behavior). In reality this was double empathy. I was happy reading by myself. After all, I brought the book to the party for this very occasion. NT people saw my behavior and lack of social signals as extreme coldness or anger and acted upon that – they thought I had an active message for them when it was just a hallucination.

I had no experience of this – I had no idea and still wouldn’t unless my wife told me.