My serious answer as a neurotypical person is that it depends on what you mean by being better at communicating.
Is the goal is to communicate information in the clearest manner possible? Or is communication that is laden with ambiguity, irony, hierarchy etc., in short, social information that is supplementary to the literal meaning of the words, better because is more dense with meaning? And this is just considering verbal communication. Is a poem better the clearer its meaning is? There are lots of people who think so, even if I would disagree.
I think it depends on the situation, context and your own assumptions about what good communication is.
If you take the example above about the aunt wanting the clothes picked up, obviously this is pretty shitty at clearly communicating intention, and maybe she’s just bad at communicating generally. But it’s also plausible that this person felt like asking directly for whatever reason was too overbearing. Women are often socialized to avoid direct commands. In that case the communication much better matches the aunts intended goal of asking without asking, even if that message was not understood by the recipient.
This is the old pragmatics vs semantics issue.
Autistic people, speaking as one of them, tend to heavily focus on semantics in communication whereas allistic people tend to heavily focus on pragmatics.
Often autistic-coded characters in media make vulgar stereotypes of this divide and they’ll have their autistic-coded character be extremely pedantic about the semantics of communication in a condescending way, which is played off as the punchline.
But, as it is, there’s often a kernel of truth to stereotypes and this definitely tracks for autistic folks. (The first part though, not the condescension.)
What this means is that autistic people tend to miss a lot of the ancillary communication that goes on with allistic people that provides a lot of context, social cues, and signalling of intent and mood and other matters of social significance.
It’s a case of “I have investigated communication and it turns out that I meet my own priorities for communication better than others do” (shocking, I know!) and this goes both ways; I strongly suspect that allistic people often feel as though when communicating with autistic people, a lot of cues are missed and a lot of the implied meaning goes over the autistic person’s head (or worse yet, it’s interpreted as the autistic person intentionally ignoring these signals and the autistic person is considered as being rude or arrogant.)
Essentially so much of this boils down to a matter of what emphasis and purpose autistic/allistic people have for communication.
I think you’ve put this very nicely here, and I agree.
ReadFanon has discussed neurotypicals failure of Theory of Mind eloquently, but I’d also like to elaborate.
Feminine people aren’t just socialised to avoid direct commands, we’re also socialised to avoid conflict. And if someone has directly asked an autistic person to do “task” but the person was hyperfixated on something or in a rigid routine (or they don’t see the need)…the response to that can pretty easily cause conflict. The problem is the neurotypical is generally misinterpreting the cause of conflict.
Now, the correct response is to recognise when a person is in a hyperfixated state and either wait or gently bring them out before directly asking for task (non-neurotypicals love small talk on their interests, in its proper place).
But the response for neurotypicals is to withdraw and then use oblique approaches to pressure the person socially and allow the person to “want” to do the task themselves rather than force a direct hard power conflict. Which mostly just annoys.
Is the goal is to communicate information in the clearest manner possible? Or is communication that is laden with ambiguity, irony, hierarchy etc., in short, social information that is supplementary to the literal meaning of the words, better because is more dense with meaning?
ReadFanon claims that;
Autistic people, speaking as one of them, tend to heavily focus on semantics in communication whereas allistic people tend to heavily focus on pragmatics.
My experience though is that in most circumstances the kind of “dense layering of social meaning” that you’re talking about is basically indecipherable to me in the context of an interpersonal conversation.
And so part of the reason why I might resort to “focusing on semantics” in the course things is because I’m trying to get the other person in the conversation to state explicitly what they would normally be trying to convey implicitly, because I cannot actually know what they are trying to say otherwise.
It’s like subtitles for somebody with a hearing imparement.
It’s the dual empathy problem.
Go read up on Grice’s Maxims. Think about all the ways in which the “correct” thing to say is subjective (ie “don’t provide too much information”). The ablism enters the picture when every mismatch in priorities in a conversation is blamed on the neurodiverse person.
Anecdotally, many people in my life say they’re better communicators after learning to interact with me effectively.
this is also my experience, i always make the mistake of thinking that people want explanations from first principles when in reality the socially correct explanation is usually first order causes. my SO once asked me why some water bottles go glug glug instead of sploosh when you pour them out and then they made a face at me when i tried to explain what a stress tensor was
the correct answer here was that some water bottles have wider bottlenecks than others
See also:
“Why do some water bottles go glug glug instead of sploosh when you pour them out?” to mean “I am telling you in an oblique way that I am frustrated by this particular bottle that I am pouring from because it’s going glug glug when others pour smoothly.”
fuck, this never even occurred to me
this is probably the best answer actually
What do you think primarily influences the sound when water is poured from a bottle? Is it the material of the bottle or something else?
In this case it’s air getting in the way of the water. There’s a vacuum created when water leaves the container, but the water is heavy enough to still fall out. The air displaced by the water is light enough to travel to fill that vacuum, but if the mouth is narrow enough, the water gets in the way until the forces are sufficient for a bubble of air to travel into the container, interrupting the flow until the forces are such that water flows again.
i tried to explain what a stress tensor was
Tangential but you might enjoy Richard Feynman’s “why” lecture.
In defence of Grice, they are maxims and so he’s being perspicuous in his choice of terms here; these aren’t standardised guidelines which enumerate all the different permutations of conversations and describe exactly how much is the appropriate quantity of information or distinguish what is and is not relevant, for example, because doing so would be downright impossible.
I think that speaking with children gives you good insight into how these maxims are based on convention because kids will routinely violate these maxims and it can be downright exasperating at times but it helps illuminate how we have an intuitive grasp of what is relevant, what a sufficient amount of information without being excessive looks like, and why things like clarity, orderliness, and being truthful are important to effective communication (even if that intuitive grasp isn’t perfectly exact.)
The ablism enters the picture when every mismatch in priorities in a conversation is blamed on the neurodiverse person.
Hard agree.
In the aunt example, that’s 100% a person who was supposed to put up the laundry and forgot lol
How could they forget if they were never told so in the first place?
It’s probably passive-aggressive
Your own aunt should probably know you can’t just say “soon be drying weather” and expect their autistic neice/nephew to know what’s up. Like a total stranger wouldn’t pick up on “wow it’s sunny out” = “put up the laundry please” because they don’t have that relationship and to just keep banging their proverbial neurotypical head against this long established miscommunication strategy is quite the silly thing to do unless they think their siblings child is purposefully being obtuse all the time and “hiding” it (because they don’t think autism is real presumably).
You underestimate how obtuse boomers can be.
Well yeah they probably got the shit kicked out of them for deviating slightly from their expected duties and then when their parents wanted to warn them to get shit done they just started the conversation and they didn’t even wanna let it get close to being asked, lest they get their ass beat again. There was lead in the air and fear in the minds. All about control, as it ever was since the pilgrims landed.
If you think they boomers are narcissists, imagine “The Greatest Generation”…
I’m confident they probably asked them to do it multiple times and they didn’t do it. And then it was finally a sunny day and they mentioned it assuming they’d tie it together with them asking to do the laundry the last 3 days.
Idk this sounds like one of those Southern hospitality things.
I’m not from the South so I only can repeat what I’ve seen on TikTok, but culturally it’s rude to ask someone to do something so they rely on implications.
One example was a person visiting her mom who had some extra apples and gave them to her. This apparently meant she wanted her to bake an apple pie.
I’m NT, but would never have been able to understand that.
That’s fair. Had no idea that implication even existed anywhere haha.
I don’t really think so. It’s only true insofar as NDs have to learn how to codeswitch when communicating with NTs while NTs are the neurological equivalent of monolingual Anglos. Overall, I think communication is a skill that everyone has to work on. You work on your native communication style, and once you get that down, you can then branch out into different communication styles. NTs are just pushy about insisting you master their particular style before your own native style.
There’s definitely NDs who are poor communicators even by the standards of their particular form of neurodiversity. But the trick is to practice and cultivate your native communication style, not try to follow NT’s communication style.
But the trick is to practice and cultivate your native communication style, not try to follow NT’s communication style.
Then you’ll be doomed to be misunderstood by the majority of people.
Related, I’ve always wondered if autistic people have an advantage in learning/integrating into foreign cultures over neurotypicals. Acclimating to a foreign culture requires you to consciously study and learn cues, customs, both explicit and unspoken rules, etc. and gain skill in performing them through repeated practice and exposure. Autistic people have to do this by necessity just to function in their own society, whereas neurotypicals who haven’t immersed themselves in a foreign culture have spent their whole lives cruising through social interactions on autopilot.
a few years ago I tried joining a vc with some friends (some autistic even) and I ended up disconnecting in tears cause listening to their repartee was such a harsh reminder of how bad I am verbally. when I have to speak out loud I just blank or stumble through inane things. I have to work pretty hard to communicate clearly even when I know what I want to say, and thinking of things to say is mostly beyond my ability
so I guess I wish other autistic people would stop trying to make communication issues out to be some kind of hidden superpower. for me it’s just a disability.
I feel you. I feel the same way about voice chats. But something that changed my perspective a lot was seeing disability advocates talk about how a lot of that effect isnt really your fault, that communication issues between people are two sided and when its an Alltistic person and autistic person its not up to the autistic person to rise to the standards of the alltistic person only. There was a really good blog idk if it still exists called “real social skills” that focused on this, where some of it was tips for autistic people communicating but a LOT of it was tips on how NT people can better communicate with autistic people.
its social model of disability stuff I guess.
Recognizing tone is not only helpful for intentional communication. It helps the listener to understand the speaker’s emotional state, of which even the speaker may be unaware. If the speaker sounds giddy, they may not be consciously communicating their giddiness; it just comes with the words as metadata. NT speakers use this meta-language intentionally during speech, but that is not the entire scope of its function, in fact it is only secondary.
When I need shit done I just ask politely, it’s that easy!
Not knowing the context, the case in the screenshot just seems like bad communication tbh and I think that would have gone over a lot of neurotypical people’s heads. It’s conceivable that there might have been some context where that meaning was more clear, but sometimes people also just communicate things poorly
Being able to abstract between the general and the specific with ease means that neurotypicals can compress information in a way that still preserves the core message, give it to another NT, and then the other NT can extract the useful parts with the same relative effort. The speaker delivers a small subset of the initial information and the listener absorbs an even smaller subset, but it’s enough for NTs in most day-to-day communications.
As autistics, we tend to find utility in a lot more information than neurotypicals do. Our communication style requires the listener’s full attention to be most effective because it gives them much more information to parse. It takes more time and energy from both parties, but it’s lossless and it leads to a more complete understanding.
Its sort of like the “NTs expect you to apologize without explination, but for ND people an apology without an explanation feels incomplete” thing
I think they might just be anxious about asking someone to do something. I’m also anxious about that same thing, but instead of the indirect communication, I just don’t say anything.
