مشكلة التعاطف المزدوج 

Do autistic people really struggle to communicate — or are neurotypical people equally unable to read neurotypes different from their own?

Introduction

When we speak of neurodiversity, we speak of a wide spectrum of differences in how the human brain works: autism, ADHD, learning differences such as dyslexia and dyscalculia, and others. These neurotypes differ in their details, yet their members share one fundamental experience: a single prevailing assumption held about them in their societies — that there is one “natural” way to communicate, to feel, and to express oneself, and that everything outside it is deficient or in need of correction.

From this single assumption flows a long chain of consequences that neurodivergent people live through: labeling, stigma, the constant pressure to modify one’s behavior, masking and camouflaging, and ultimately burnout and psychological suffering. To understand where this chain begins, we need the concept that exposed the flaw in that first assumption and stripped away its mask of “scientific neutrality”: the double empathy problem.

What Is the Double Empathy Problem?

The concept was introduced in 2012 by the British sociologist Damian Milton — himself an autistic person who writes from within the experience, not merely about it, and one of the most prominent voices in critical autism studies. He coined the term in a paper published in the journal *Disability & Society*, defining it as:

a breakdown in reciprocity between two differently constituted social actors, which grows sharper the wider the gap between their perceptions of the world — experienced by neurotypical people as a breach of what counts as “socially natural,” while autistic people live it as a daily, and often jarring, reality.

The definition may look simple at first glance, but it in fact turns the prevailing understanding on its head. What Milton is telling us is that when communication breaks down between an autistic person and a neurotypical person, the breakdown does not occur because of a cognitive deficit located inside one person’s mind. It arises from a gap between the two perspectives through which each of them experiences the world. Both fail — to an equal degree — to read the other intuitively. The only difference between them is that one has always been treated by society as “the normal one,” while the other has always been treated as someone whose behavior is faulty and must be corrected and modified.

Although the concept emerged specifically within autism research, its core principle extends to every meeting point between two different neurotypes: between a person with ADHD and their neurotypical colleague at work, or between a child with learning differences and a teacher who treats the curriculum as though there were only one way to absorb it.

Origins: Where Did This Name Come From?

Milton did not produce this concept out of a theoretical vacuum. In his writings on his lived experience, he describes how the idea took shape within him as an autistic person who spent years being labeled “asocial” and “lacking empathy” — while his own inner sense was that he sometimes read others with a precision that exceeded their ability to read him. This paradox — between what clinical psychology and the medical model said about him, and what he actually lived each day — was the first seed from which the idea of double empathy grew.

Nor was Milton alone on this journey. He was part of a generation of neurodivergent activists and researchers who, beginning in the 1990s, had been challenging the dominant deficit frameworks and proposing that what gets called a “disorder” may be a legitimate difference in how the brain works, with its own coherent internal logic. The double empathy concept arrived as an extension of this collective intellectual movement — one that neurodivergent people built for themselves and about themselves — not as an isolated individual discovery.

Academically, Milton drew on sociological and philosophical traditions that had already rejected the idea that “complete understanding of another person” is possible at all, even between neurotypical people themselves. Prominent within these traditions is the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young’s work on “asymmetrical reciprocity” (Iris Marion Young, 1997) and the sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on stigma and social identity (Erving Goffman, 1963).

When we place this idea alongside double empathy, we arrive at a simple but revealing observation: if none of us can truly perceive the world from inside another mind, then demanding this perception from neurodivergent people alone — as a condition for being considered “normal” — is, at its core, a political stance toward a minority, not a scientific truth about the nature of the human mind.

The Meaning of “Double” in the Name

The word “double” is not a linguistic detail — it overturns the entire idea.

For decades, the prevailing view of autistic people — driven by theories such as “mindblindness” and “theory of mind,” which were also applied to other neurodivergent people — assumed that communication breaks down because the neurodivergent person is simply unable to understand the neurotypical other. In other words: the problem is an individual deficit, running in one direction, resting on a single standard for the human mind.

From this view, an entire cognitive and linguistic environment took shape — an invisible barrier that neurodivergent people have lived with for decades, in which doctors, specialists, caregivers, families, schools, and society used language and concepts that treated difference in neurological wiring as a defect and an incapacity. The result was a distorted image that settled both in the neurotypical person’s awareness of the neurodivergent person, and in the neurodivergent person’s awareness of themselves.

This is where Milton’s framing of the double empathy problem reverses the direction of the entire question. Instead of asking, “Why doesn’t the autistic person understand other people?”, he invites us to ask something entirely different: why do we assume in the first place that the fault — the breakdown in communication — lies with one side only? What if the neurotypical person is equally unable to read the neurodivergent one? Is it because neurodivergent people are a minority that the majority’s inability to read the other’s language and grasp their perspective was deemed “natural,” while the minority’s inability was deemed a “disorder” requiring intervention?

Here we can see the doubleness the name carries within it: both parties operate through different perceptual frameworks, both fail together to read the other intuitively, and each has a right to their own perceptual world. Yet only one of them carries the burden of the communication failure, is asked to continuously modify their behavior, and is treated as though the fault lies in their nervous system.

The Scientific Evidence: What Does the Research Say?

Since the concept was introduced in 2012, substantial empirical evidence has accumulated around it. Here are the most significant findings:

A study by Crompton and colleagues (Crompton et al., 2020) tested how information travels through chains of eight participants in an experiment resembling the game of “broken telephone.” The researchers found that information travels with high efficiency when the entire chain consists of autistic people, and equally when it consists entirely of neurotypical people — but it breaks down noticeably in mixed chains that bring together people of different neurotypes. The problem, in other words, is not in how autistic people communicate in itself; it appears precisely at the meeting point between the two neurotypes.

Heasman and Gillespie (Heasman & Gillespie, 2018) examined how autistic people understand themselves and their families, versus how their families understand them. Autistic people were more accurate in estimating the misunderstanding between themselves and their relatives, while families attributed the breakdown to the autistic person’s “deficit” alone. The neurodivergent person in this experiment was not incapable of perceiving the other — they were at times more aware of the gap between themselves and neurotypical people than the neurotypical people were.

In a later experiment, the same researchers used a video game scenario in which neurotypical participants were led to believe they were interacting with another player. When told this player was autistic or had dyslexia, they rated him as less helpful and less useful — even though his behavior had not actually changed. The bias was in the eye of the beholder, not in the neurodivergent person’s conduct.

Sasson and colleagues (Sasson et al., 2017) showed that neurotypical people form negative judgments about autistic people within seconds of meeting them, reducing their willingness to interact before any conversation has even begun.

Recent systematic reviews (Watts et al., 2025) confirmed that autistic people describe their encounters with other autistic people with a sense of mutual understanding, acceptance, and ease that they do not find in encounters with non-autistic people. And newer research (Foster et al., 2025; Efthimiou et al., 2025) confirmed that communication quality and motor synchrony between participants improve in encounters between people of the same neurotype and decline in mixed encounters — empirically supporting the central principle of the double empathy problem.

Taken together, what this research tells us is that communication breakdown is a relational phenomenon — a product of the relationship between people, not an individual deficit. It is a condition that arises when two parties’ communication tools fail to align in a given context.

Why Do We Need This Name?

The question may seem theoretical at first, but it is not. To name a phenomenon is to redistribute responsibility among those involved in it — and to change how people judge one another in daily life.

Before the double empathy concept entered the conversation, a neurodivergent person — autistic, or with ADHD, or with learning differences — would return from a social interaction confused and drained, hearing the people around them repeat the same sentence: this person can’t communicate, and needs to learn how.

Therapies, interventions, and schools were all built on a single unquestioned premise: the problem is in the person, and the solution is for them to keep modifying their behavior to resemble others more and more.

And here lies a point often neglected in the discussion. What societies demand of the neurodivergent person is not a minor “change,” nor the acquisition of a new skill, but a continuous reprogramming of how they speak, how their body moves, the tone of their voice, the direction of their gaze, even the rhythm of their own thinking. It is ongoing behavior modification, occurring in nearly every interaction, all day, for life.

This difference — between the word “change,” which suggests an innocent request, and the term “behavior modification,” which suggests a heavy imposition — is the difference between how the demand looks from the outside and how the experience is lived from within.

This is where the value of naming the phenomenon “double” comes in: it changed the very question being asked. Instead of asking, “How do we modify this person’s behavior so they resemble the majority?”, we began asking, “How do we build bridges between two different worlds, each of which has the right to remain as it is?” This is a fundamental shift, because it redirects the intervention: from adjusting the individual to fit the environment, to adjusting the environment to accommodate a human diversity that was present within it from the beginning.

The Social Impact: What Happens When One Neurotype Dominates?

Here the idea moves from theory into lived reality — into the daily life of every neurodivergent person reading these words and recognizing exactly what we mean.

When the neurotypical mode of communication, empathy, feeling, and self-expression is presented as the “natural” mode and the sole neurological standard — as how people “ought” to behave — a chain of consequences unfolds, one after another:

1. Labeling begins. Whoever departs from this standard is classified as “deficient” or “disordered,” even when they understand themselves and their surroundings in a way that is entirely coherent from within. The child with ADHD hears that they are “lazy and unfocused”; the child with learning differences hears that they are “slow and careless”; the autistic child hears that they are “cold and strange.” Judgments that do not express who the person is, but reflect the distance between them and what they are expected to be.

2. Labeling turns into social stigma. The phrase travels from the specialist’s clinic into social space, becoming a mark that clings to the person wherever they go: can’t communicate, cold, unempathetic, odd, difficult, a failure. No formal diagnosis is needed for the stigma to attach — being different is enough.

3. The pressure of behavior modification begins. The person faces constant pressure from multiple sources — family, school, work, healthcare providers — to adjust their behavior toward the prevailing standard, not as a suggestion but as a condition for acceptance and inclusion. And what is demanded is not changing one habit, but recalibrating their entire self: how they walk and sit, how their hands move, the pitch of their voice, the direction of their gaze, even what they are permitted to love and care about. This is the difference we must notice: it is not a “change” but continuous behavior modification that reaches into the core of the person and the uniqueness of their neurological identity.

4. The person resorts to masking and camouflaging. They begin hiding their authentic neurological traits, performing the role of a neurotypical person around the clock in order to be accepted: the autistic person forces direct eye contact on themselves and suppresses the stimming that soothes their nervous system; the person with ADHD exhausts themselves to appear “calm and organized”; the person with learning differences develops elaborate concealment strategies so their difference is never discovered and never costs them an opportunity or a relationship. This constant performance is not a choice — it is a price paid to remain in spaces that were never designed to hold them.

5. The psychological toll appears. Research has documented over the years that long-term masking is directly linked to a state of chronic exhaustion known as autistic burnout, to elevated rates of depression and anxiety, and to increased suicidality among neurodivergent adults (Hull et al., 2017; Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019; Cassidy et al., 2018).

It is essential to understand that these are not traits of neurodivergence, nor symptoms that accompany it. They are challenges that arise from the environment — an invisible barrier blocking neurodivergent people from full participation, a price paid daily in exchange for inclusion in environments never designed to accommodate their difference in the first place.

What Do We Learn?

The lesson is not only that “neurodivergent people understand each other” — though that is true, and there is a beauty and ease in it that neurodivergent people rarely find in many of their relationships with neurotypical people. The lesson runs far deeper.

To begin a genuine journey into understanding neurodiversity — autism, ADHD, learning differences, and beyond — we must first acknowledge that human beings have multiple modes of feeling, empathizing, communicating, and expressing themselves; that all of these modes are legitimate; and that they deserve to be treated as authentic human patterns with their own internal logic, not as deviations from a single rule that the majority set as a fixed standard.

This does not mean erasing differences between people, or pretending they never cause genuine misunderstanding. The differences are real; communication does break down, and struggles do occur, when people with different neurological wiring meet — and it carries an emotional cost for both sides. But the scientific and rights-based leap that the double empathy concept invites us to make is to stop placing that cost on one side alone, and to recognize that building understanding between people is a shared responsibility of everyone who enters the conversation — not a duty imposed on whomever society deems “different.”

We should also notice that this gap does not stop at the doors of schools, workplaces, institutions, and the medical system. It seeps into romantic relationships, friendships, family bonds — into every space where two neurologically different people meet and try to understand each other. Recent research (Ridout & Hayward, 2019; Ghanbari Panah & Mustaffa, 2026) has begun documenting how much of what gets read in these relationships as “coldness,” “emotional avoidance,” or “indifference” is in truth a perceptual gap between two neurotypes — one that can be bridged with understanding instead of blame, and by adjusting both parties’ expectations rather than demanding that one of them alone modify their behavior. To see the double empathy problem in these spaces, specifically, is to give people — neurodivergent and neurotypical alike — more inclusive, more reciprocal tools of communication that allow each to understand and be understood on their own terms, so that the disappointments of misunderstanding in their relationships do not turn into a personal failure carried by one of them alone.

Perhaps the most important thing we can take from all of this is that real change begins the moment we recognize that this gap exists — and that the responsibility for bridging it is shared between neurotypical and neurodivergent people together.

The neurotypical person is invited to recognize that what they have always considered “self-evident” in communication and empathy is not a universal law of humanity, but one mode among many others — and that a communication breakdown between them and a neurodivergent person is not a deficit on the other side, but a cognitive and perceptual gap between the two.

The neurodivergent person, in turn, is invited to reclaim their understanding of themselves from their own perspective — to recognize that what took shape in their awareness over a lifetime as “a fault in their neurological wiring” is in truth half of an equation, whose other half always lay with the neurotypical side that never once carried the burden of the communication failure, and was never seen as a partner in the perceptual and cognitive gap between them.

What must be said clearly, in closing, is that neurodiversity is not a condition calling for “tolerance” or “care,” nor an individual phenomenon to be merely accepted as an exception to be managed. It is an authentic human condition, present for as long as humans have been human — one that deserves that we move beyond the language of passive acceptance toward a deeper language built on empowerment, and on reshaping our cognitive, linguistic, social, and institutional environments so that neurological difference is embraced as a natural part of human diversity, not a deviation from it.

The double empathy problem is the first doorway into this understanding. When we recognize that a communication breakdown between two different neurotypes is a shared responsibility between them, we begin building environments that do not require the neurodivergent person to hide the traits of their neurological identity or modify their behavior to prove they deserve acceptance — environments re-engineered to make room for their difference, guaranteeing them full participation in life, like any other human being.

——————

By neurodivergents, for neurodivergents.