Thread by @erikaheidewald

i started contemplating something & i have no idea if it’s right or wrong so i’d love to hear people’s personal thoughts. basically - are we sure autistic people don’t pick up on social cues? or do we just not know the unspoken social rules behind them that dictate their meaning?

i was thinking in particular about facial expression and tone. those are things you can learn from pattern recognition, and a lot of people who have spent a lot of time socializing learn so many patterns so well that they struggle to figure out if it was instinctual or learned

i was thinking in my own personal life - who have i seen not pick up on social cues? obviously there’s always the chance i’m not the ideal observer, but the examples i can think of are neurotypical men ignoring women’s cues of discomfort. they pick up on it, but they don’t care

signs of discomfort are to me some of the most important social cues to pick up on - i’ve always been terrified of making people feel uncomfortable, creeped out, or unsafe, so i’m very aware of them and they’re not hard to spot. are autistic people missing these cues? i doubt it

most of the autistic people i know are very concerned about not violating people’s boundaries and we err on the side of being distant or overexplaining instead of assuming our presence is welcome. what i have seen autistic people do is break arbitrary unspoken social rules.

we give feedback we think is constructive and it’s seen as an attack, we talk to our boss and our manager feels their status threatened, we answer “how are you” honestly. these are all unspoken social rules that come out of the way neurotypical people think. there are no cues

i got paranoid at first after i realized i’m autistic and i hasn’t been picking up on a lot of the social world around me - how much had i been missing? i became hyper aware in my conversations with people and asked them every time i couldn’t tell how they were feeling

eventually my friends told me i should really stop worrying about that because i am in tune with people and they didn’t feel i was getting anything wrong. i realized that i could always tell when their mood shifted, i just didn’t know the reason. had i hurt their feelings?

or were they just getting tired? thinking about something else in their life they’re dealing with? that part i can’t figure out, so i just ask. so i can pick up on cues with people’s tone and facial expression just fine. really well, in fact. i just don’t know their thoughts

i don’t know their thoughts because i’m not neurotypical and not them. no matter how much i learn, i’ll never be able to know what a neurotypical person might think about every situation in the world. so my “deficit” is just not being neurotypical.

thinking of the autistic people i know, i don’t think we are failing to pick up on facial expressions & tone that denote someone being mad at us. what we don’t pick up on is when we break an arbitrary norm we didn’t know about & the other person stews inside while smiling outside

i don’t see autistic people missing social cues. i see us missing the invisible social rules nobody ever told us about and make no sense to us. facial expression and tone cannot tell you that when people smile and say “let’s get lunch sometime!” they don’t mean it.

if we can tell from people’s tone and expression that they are upset or angry but we don’t know why, that’s because we don’t think like they do. we’re not missing cues for social norms, we don’t know or understand the norms because we don’t value the same things allistics do.

if all this is true, then we don’t have a problem picking up on things, we’re just being expected to think and feel the same way an allistic does. we’re being expected to not be autistic. we will never be able to do that.

as i said at the beginning, i could be wrong about this. i think i’m right that this is my experience but i’ve always been a very social person so i’d be really curious to hear from people who consider themselves to struggle with socializing & see if it holds true for you at all

and to make my question a little more specific - do you think you experience a cognitive inability to read faces and vocal tone, or do we just not have the same reference points to interpret them? or maybe can you read them but miss them if there’s too much to focus on?

for the record i don’t think there’s anything wrong with how we communicate whatsoever, this isn’t a value judgment of us at all. i’m just curious to get more granular with the mechanics of “not picking up on social cues” and reading facial expression & tone