Misunderstandings happen all the time: sometimes substantial, sometimes diminutive. It’s a normal part of human communication, whether we’re autistic or not.
I am a huge fan of the popular BBC Radio TV series with a rural theme. Archers (one of my autistic interests!) and the final episode, which used a classic type of misunderstanding. Susan Carter is busy shopping for groceries in the local supermarket. Her long-lost brother Clive (who doesn’t live in the village and hasn’t been seen for years) surprises her by turning up unexpectedly in the greengrocer’s aisle. “Clive!” says Susan, “What are you doing here?” Clive’s response? “Some groceries for my tea.”
The problem with this misunderstanding is the context. Susan wants to know what Clive is doing here: back in the village. For Susan the context is larger. It is that Clive is re-entering her life and the village after years of absence. Clive answers what he is doing here: in this building, the supermarket. For him the context is much more immediate. He gives an answer that relates to the present moment. Why is he Herein the supermarket? Well, she’s shopping for tea…
Relevance theory is a lesser-known theory in linguistics (the study of languages and human communication) that talks a lot about how shared context (or, more precisely, the things that suppose context) affects how we understand each other. Relevance theory seems to me to be a really useful tool for understanding the difficulties of communication between neurotypicals (e.g. between autistic and non-autistic people).
Although misunderstandings happen all the time, they are much more common and have a much greater impact on the success of communication when they occur in interactions between neurotypicals (e.g., between autistic and non-autistic people). Historically, autistic people have been blamed for these communication breakdowns and described as unable to “handle” social communication or understand the perspectives of others. We now know that this is not actually true. The problem is, two-way problem: neurotypical people have as much difficulty understanding autistic people as autistic people have difficulty understanding neurotypical people. This bidirectional problem is often referred to as “the problem of double empathy.Validity theory can aid us understand why the dual empathy problem occurs (and hopefully aid us cope with it better).
The problem is that words don’t mean much on their own. At first, this might seem like a strange idea. We have dictionaries where we can look up the meaning of words, right? They have to mean something… But as we saw in the example above with Susan Carter and Clive Horrobin, you can apply the word “here,” but it can refer to any number of different things. There’s always an element of guesswork when you’re trying to figure out what someone means.
If you’re not convinced yet, here’s another example. Imagine you’re sitting watching TV with a friend or family member. You see them lean forward and frown, and you realize they probably can’t hear it very well. You see them patting the couch around them, searching for something, and then they ask you, “Do you have scatterbrain?” One sec ‘scatterbrain“is (although it sounds delicious) a made-up word that has no meaning and cannot be looked up in the dictionary, you will probably quickly guess that they are asking you for the remote control (to augment the volume).
Relevance theory tells us that in order to correctly guess (or: understand) what someone means, you must be able to correctly infer what that person wanted you to know (or: their “intentions”). You must be able to imagine what context is most “relevant” to the speaker, and as a speaker, you must have some idea of what context and interpretation will be most relevant to your listener.
It sounds like a lot of difficult work, but it’s something that happens intuitively and at high speed all the time, without you even realizing it. According to relevance theory, our brains rely on shortcuts (called “heuristics”) to aid us identify the most appropriate interpretation whenever we hear or read something. A heuristic (or brain shortcut) looks something like this:
The most exact interpretation is the one that requires the least amount of mental energy to process while conveying the most fresh information.
Whenever you hear or read something, your mind will consider different possible interpretations, stopping at the first one that meets the above rule.
Most of the time, these calculations work really well and allow us to communicate quickly, correctly understanding what people mean, sentence by sentence, sentence by sentence, sentence by sentence… But they rely on us (more or less) correctly estimating how much mental energy it will take the other person to process what we’ve said, and that in turn depends on us knowing what we have in common (and therefore what is obvious to the other person and basic to process).
The more similar two people are, the more likely it is that our minds will be organized in a similar way and that we will have similar ways of understanding things. Accuracy theory describes this in terms of us having larger “mutual cognitive environments” (or, in other words, there is more overlap in the way our minds work). The heuristic/shortcut described above calculates accuracy based on how closely think we both know that we have something in common (or what we both think we know is within our mutual cognitive environment).
And that’s the rub: autistic and non-autistic people have very different ways of processing information. They often have very different ways of thinking, very different sensory experiences that shape the way they see the world, and as a result, they probably have very different “cognitive environments.” Things that might be very obvious to an autistic person might not be obvious to a non-autistic person, and vice versa.
The good news is that (of course!) autistic and non-autistic people can understand each other, although it may take a little more effort on their part.