• randomsnark@lemmy.ml
    ·
    3 months ago

    This has been pretty widely discussed under the name "the double empathy problem", although as always it's good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other's communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they're speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.

    I wasn't sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I'm crazy indicates it's pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.

    Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

    • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      ·
      3 months ago

      The idea is older than Milton. In 1988, Jim Sinclair wrote "Some Thoughts About Empathy":

      https://web.archive.org/web/20090321213935/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/empathy.htm