semi-automatic waffle

Tuesday, 13 May 2025

The double empathy problem is a concept developed by autistic scholar Damian Milton. It challenges the traditional, one-sided view that autistic people have a "deficit" in empathy or social communication. Instead, Milton argues that difficulties in social understanding between autistic and non-autistic people are mutual—not the fault of one side alone.

In short:

The double empathy problem says that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people are two-way. Both parties may struggle to understand each other due to differences in ways of experiencing, processing, and expressing the world.

Key points:

1. Mutual misunderstanding

Non-autistic people often assume they are neutral observers, and that any social communication difficulties lie in the autistic person.
The double empathy problem flips this assumption: non-autistic people also struggle to understand autistic experiences, just as autistic people may find neurotypical social norms confusing or alienating.

2. Differences, not deficits

It reframes autism not as a lack of empathy, but as a difference in communicative style, emotional expression, and world-perception.
These differences can lead to misattunement—but not because one side lacks social intelligence or care.

3. Relational and contextual

Empathy is not a static trait—it’s relational, unfolding in real-time, and deeply shaped by context.
So-called "failures" of empathy are often failures of mutual recognition across neurodivergent and neurotypical divides.

4. Implications

This model supports the need for neurodiversity-affirming approaches in education, therapy, and everyday interaction.
It shifts the goal from trying to "fix" autistic behavior to fostering mutual understanding, respect, and shared communication space.

An analogy:

Imagine two people trying to communicate—one speaks English, the other speaks Japanese. Each person might interpret the other as rude, cold, or strange—not because either lacks empathy, but because they’re using different social languages.

Related insights:

Research has found that autistic people often communicate more effectively with each other than with non-autistic people. This supports the idea that the issue lies in mismatch, not lack.
The double empathy problem invites a move away from pathologizing autism and toward reciprocal, inclusive models of communication.

The double empathy problem doesn’t just reframe autism research—it opens up deeper philosophical conversations around epistemic injustice and relational ethics. Let’s unpack how.

✦ 1. Epistemic Injustice: Misrecognition of Knowledge and Experience

Coined by Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice refers to when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. This includes:

Testimonial injustice: when a speaker's credibility is unfairly downgraded.
Hermeneutical injustice: when someone lacks the conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences, or society lacks the willingness to hear them.

How it relates to the double empathy problem:

Autistic people often experience testimonial injustice when their accounts of their own minds or social experiences are dismissed, pathologized, or ignored—especially in medical, educational, or therapeutic settings.
They face hermeneutical injustice when mainstream society lacks the frameworks to understand neurodivergent ways of being. For example, monotropism or sensory overwhelm are often misread as rudeness, irrationality, or disorder, rather than as alternate modes of experience.

In the double empathy framework, communication breakdowns are not just interpersonal—they're political. They reflect a system that privileges neurotypical ways of knowing and being, rendering others invisible or unintelligible.

✦ 2. Relational Ethics: The Ethics of Encounter

Relational ethics moves beyond rules or outcomes—it’s about how we meet each other. Thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas, Nel Noddings, and Carol Gilligan emphasize the moral weight of presence, attention, and mutual vulnerability.

Applied to the double empathy problem:

The ethical failure is not that autistic people don’t "perform" empathy in neurotypical ways, but that neurotypical society refuses to dwell with difference.
Relational ethics asks: How do we respond to the other’s opacity? Can we hold space for what we don’t understand, instead of reducing the other to a problem?

Milton’s idea implicitly demands a non-hierarchical ethics—one where being misunderstood isn't a sign of moral or psychological failure, but an invitation to rework the relationship.

✦ Synthesis: From Miscommunication to Moral Failure

When autistic people are consistently misread, talked over, or corrected—when their social attunement is framed only as deficit—they are not just being misunderstood. They are being epistemically and ethically erased.

The double empathy problem, when viewed through this lens, becomes a structural critique:

It challenges the asymmetry of knowledge legitimacy.
It calls out the moral laziness of institutions that expect autistic people to adapt endlessly without reciprocity.
And it insists on an ethics of attunement, not conformity.

✦ Closing thought

What if the real problem is not that autistic people lack empathy—but that our culture lacks the courage to meet difference?

That is the ethical demand at the heart of the double empathy problem. It’s not just a new theory of communication. It’s a radical invitation to listen differently, to retrain our moral and epistemic reflexes, and to build mutual intelligibility without domination.

✦ 1. Judith Butler: Performativity and the (Un)Recognizable Subject

Butler’s core idea is that subjectivity is performative—not something we are, but something we do in ways that must be recognized by social norms in order to be intelligible. If we don’t perform “correctly,” we risk being unintelligible, abject, or cast outside the frame of the human.

Now apply this to autism and monotropism:

Autistic people often don’t perform neurotypical social norms—eye contact, small talk, emotional pacing—because these norms are not aligned with monotropic attention and sensory processing.
As a result, they’re often not “recognized” as socially competent, empathetic, or even fully human. They become non-subjects, or “failed” subjects, in Butler’s terms.

The double empathy problem reveals how autistic people are rendered unintelligible not because they lack personhood, but because our schemas for intelligibility are neurotypical and rigid.

This is precisely epistemic injustice in Butlerian terms: to fail the norm is to be denied the status of "someone whose truth counts."

✦ Final Thread: Recognition is Always Political

Butler: the human is a recognizable fiction, not a given.
Muñoz: the real is in the not-yet, the glimpse of a better relation.
Milton: the double empathy problem is not a personal shortcoming but a mutual and structural distortion.

Together, they point to this:

To honor autistic experience, we must unlearn what counts as real-time, empathy and coherence.