I've heard the idea that autistic people hate small talk,  repeated countless times by both autistic and non-autistic people.

However in settings such AutAngel's peer support groups as and Autscape which are wholly or predominantly autistic you’ll see lots of people chatting away (as well as people standing awkwardly in corners). I've long puzzled over seeing autistic people who swear they hate small talk having conversations that sound to me like small talk in autistic settings.
Looking up small talk on the internet I find it defined as “polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions” and “an informal type of discourse that does not cover any functional topics of conversation or any transactions that need to be addressed.” Wikipdedia's article on Small Talk explains that “In spite of seeming to have little useful purpose, small talk is a bonding ritual and a strategy for managing interpersonal distance. It serves many functions in helping to define the relationships between friends, colleagues, and new acquaintances..” 

These definitions make clear in different ways that the content of small talk is not the point.  The point is a desire to connect.  For most autistic people however, the point of a conversation is the content.  If the content is engaging they will connect, content leads to connection. It seems that for many NT’s (neuro-typical or non-autistic people) connection comes before content, so they connect with contentless conversation and if that works they will move on to sharing meaningful content.

As well as establishing connection in contrasting ways it seems that the average NT probably wants more superficial connection with other humans than the average autistic person, and they signal the desire to connect by sharing inconsequential information. 

Most of us autistics want language to be used to mean what it says not as a backdrop to an invisible social signal. So when NT’s use random thoughts to try connect with another person it can work well with fellow NT’s but tends to fail with autistics as we need meaningful content and can get stressed by a feeling that we are expected to share meaningless trivialities (added to which we have no idea what is acceptable to say and what could trigger an adverse reaction, we feel that we’re being invited into a minefield). Before we speak we need to either be interested in the subject we are speaking about or the person we are talking to. 

So while in an autistic setting (or any setting where they feel safe) many autistic people will ask after someone else’s family or discuss how travel arrangements, because they are genuinely interested and connected. This can give the impression of being small talk, but in fact its meaningful because of the prior connection of the participants. The conversation does not create the connection it happens because of it.

My contention is that NTs will talk about inconsequential matters to create connection while autistics will only do so when they already feel connected.  Social skills courses which teach people that should talk about the weather are teaching masking not connection.

If we repeat stock phrases because we've been taught that's what you're supposed to do it’s likely to feel unnatural, appear stilted and require lots of effort and energy leaving us feeling depleted and unable to actually listen and respond to the other person’s reply. Masking causes disconnection rather than connection so shouldn’t really be considered a social skill. (There is currently a social media campaign urging people to #TaketheMaskOff)

Discovering that I am autistic led me to better understand what was going on socially for me and for others and enabled me to make choices based on this.  I now find it much easier to engage in casual conversation because I’ve found a compromise.  I do it my way, I don’t as I used to try and immediately dive into deep discussions, but I do often manage to connect by talking lightly about everyday matters that interest me but are unlikely to evoke deep feelings.

My last blog post outlined some things which I think are unhelpful in relation to autism and social skills. I will now take the glass half full approach, and discuss what I think is helpful.
For me the single most helpful thing was going to Autscape where autistic people are in the majority. It was the first time I was in a situation with a level playing field socially.  I am not the only one who has felt transformed by this experience.  The confidence I gained at Autscape has enabled me to deal with a much wider variety of social situations and to build connections within the larger community.  I found that understanding how and why I am atypical made it much easier to accept myself as I am and to address my various challenges.  This understanding also enabled me to feel comfortable explaining my differences to others.  

Interestingly the book I think best addresses difficulties talking with others was not written specifically for autistics.  It is entitled “How you can talk to anyone in every situation” by Emma Sargent and Tim Fearon.  Of course there are very few people, autistic or otherwise, who could achieve this – but this is as good a guide as I’ve seen in terms of helping people improve their ability to connect socially.  The fact that is written for a general audience is a plus, as it doesn’t condescend or assume that there is an inherent deficit that needs addressing.

I think the point here is that the social differences and difficulties experienced by autistic people are not only about specific social skills, they are also about contextualising complex communications in real time.  This is why a lot of autistic people with first class degrees in psychology are hopeless in social situations.  Expecting theoretical training to enable people to perform socially is like expecting a male obstetrician to give birth.

Social skills training and social stories (which like ABA are touted everywhere as a brilliant thing for autism, without this being verified by rigorous research) assume that there will be a predictable context in which to use those skills.  This is manifestly not the case.  In real life the aim of social skill is to facilitate actual connection and connection requires more than one party.  It makes sense if connection is not happening to look at both parties and try and find a compromise.

Exhibiting “social skills” without being honest or true to yourself is not relating to others or learning social skills, rather it is acting.

Social interaction by its nature requires more than one participant This brings me to the radical idea that maybe the non-autistic participants in social interaction with an autistic person should share responsibility for finding a way of relating that works.   Non- autistic people often don’t have to think about their social style they just assume it is neutral, but as Gary Younge says in his book ‘Who we are – and should it matter in the 21st century?’  “Those who feel they are without identity do not see the need to meet people halfway and thereby fail to recognize that everyone else is doing all the travelling”.

Damian Milton calls this the “double empathy problem”  .  He suggests that the social difficulties of autistic people are caused by contrasting ways of relating rather than an autistic deficit.  Whatever the complex mechanisms underlying social intelligence, I think we can safely say that this is something that needs to be further explored and that non- autistic people training autistic people to pretend to be non-autistic is unlikely to be the best solution we can come up with.

If you are autistic or think you might be and  would like to explore this territory in more detail you might be interested in my “Exploring Identifying as Autistic” programme which aims to help people accept themselves and communicate authentically.

I’ll finish with some lovely lines from T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets that I think are relevant here.
“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”

.  
One thing that autistic people have in common is a social difference (of course we humans are all different in that we are each unique, what I mean here is that autistic people interact with others atypically).  I think this is because autistics are unable to pick up non-verbal and other communication that is below the level of consciousness.  Like much to do with autism, the cause of this social difference (which everyone across the contentious field of autism agrees exists) is not clear.  While I believe that the lack of social radar equipment to detect social signals is one of the main reasons for social atypicality there are other factors that also contribute to varying degrees.  
It is clear to me that issues with “theory of mind” (the very non-literal term used for the intuitive awareness that the contents or other people’s minds are different from the contents of our own mind) and what psychologists tend to call mentalising can impact severely on the ability to relate successfully to other human beings.

Autistic people are often distressed by problems mixing with others and making friends and therefore jump at the chance to learn social skills which they hope will solve these problems.   Despite the popularity of social skills training the limited research that exists suggests that such training is not very effective in real life* .  I find this totally unsurprising. Nobody has suggested giving deaf people hearing training or blind people sight training. As social skills require an ability to pick up social signals that is absent in autistic people, training is unlikely to be effective because, despite high motivation, the social radar equipment is just not there.

What I suspect happens is that the social skills sessions themselves are successful in that the people attending get to have a nice time which includes limited socialising with each other. They learn what to do in specific scenarios, they learn the steps to go through, and they have enjoyed it so they give the training good feedback.  Everybody is happy, outcome measures get nice ticks but nothing changes in the outside world, the lessons that seemed so relevant in class turn out to be irrelevant in the real world because the real world does not use the same scripts that were taught in class.

I regard this lack of “social radar” as being somewhat analogous to tone deafness in music (I am tone deaf).  I used to love singing, but unfortunately I was exposed in front of the class at age 7 as the one who was singing incorrectly and since then I have been unable to sing in public. What is particularly humiliating about this was that I was doing my best and as far as I am concerned I was singing in tune, but everyone else could hear that in fact I wasn’t.  Most autistics have had the experience with trying to engage socially, trying to get along with people, doing what we believe to be the right thing, but discovering that others think we are doing something wrong.  We tend to get rejected without ever finding out what exactly we did wrong (or we realise ourselves a week later when the time to rectify it has passed). We are just not able to “tune in” in real time to the social context we find ourselves in.  
The underlying issue is that the point of interacting socially is to connect with other people, and you don’t do this merely by exhibiting a set of skills, you do this by being your authentic self and being open to another human being.  Too many autistic people have been taught supposed “skills” which leave them in the words of Lianne Holiday Wiley “Pretending to be Normal”.  As Valerie Gaus points out in her book “Living Well on the Spectrum”  appearing “normal” does not make a person likeable and being “weird” does not necessarily make a person unlikeable.  Learning a set of rules might be necessary but it is certainly not sufficient to enable you to connect in real time with real people.

*See for example http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02179376


A core quality of autism is an atypical way of connecting with other human beings.  It is often (mistakenly) believed that autistic people lack empathy.  We are also said to lack TOM, which is not a person but an acronym for Theory of Mind.  However, I think often the use of the term Theory of Mind in the context of autism is misleading as what is usually being referred to is intuition and not theory.

The attribute called TOM is the ability to understand what thoughts another person is likely to be thinking.  For this to affect your actual interactions with other people you have to be able to discern and respond to their thoughts in real time. Having an excellent ability to work out what someone might be thinking in theory or in retrospect wouldn’t help your relationships with people if you are unable to do it while you are engaging with them.  

Saying that difficulty with relating to others is due to lack of theory of mind is therefore not particularly helpful, as someone can have a brilliant theoretical understanding of how minds work, but this is useless to them in practise if they don’t  have access to that understanding when it matters most, that is when actually interacting with other people.

My guess is that most obstetricians are male, and have a better understanding of the processes involved in childbirth than most mothers, all of whom are female. Despite the fact that male obstetricians have the best theory of childbirth, they will be trumped every time at actually producing babies by women who may have absolutely no theory of childbirth, but possess the equipment to produce babies.

Similarly autistic people might have what would be called in everyday English theory of mind, however without the equipment to intuit what other people are thinking this theory does not enable actual real time typical social interaction.

It seems to me that a disproportionate number of autistic people study psychology, however this study being theoretical doesn’t really help them with actually getting on with people. Many non- autistic people who have never formally studied psychology have an intuitive grasp of what another person might be thinking and use that to socialise.

However, the idea that autistic people lack “Theory of Mind” is often a barrier to people believing that they or another might be autistic, because the relevant person is extraordinarily adept at explaining motivation, despite not getting along easily with other humans.

So while I do think that autistic people tend to lack the ability to intuit the thoughts of others, I know for sure that we don’t lack empathy and many of us are superb at explaining psychological theory!

I don’t want to feel upset by Len[1] but I do.  I am not sure if it can be helped.  Len is a nice man and is also an ally working towards autism acceptance.  He is employed as an autism support worker and facilitated a self-advocacy group for autistic adults. He told me he loved working with this group and felt he really understood them.  “They told me that they were really scared about meeting other people, they felt they were being judged and didn’t know what to say.   I feel like that too about meeting people – I suppose we are all somewhere on the spectrum”   I think in saying this Len felt he was expressing empathy and showing that he understood and identified with an autistic sensibility.  I was aware of this but the remark still upset me, in fact I was so upset that I was unable to discuss the issue  and instead just muttered something  nondescript that probably sounded appreciative to him. 

I know I am not the only autistic who feels frustrated when I hear this things like “I feel like that too”…….”that is normal, we all feel that way”………” everyone has a bit of autism”. I also know they are often said by well-meaning people who want to support us so it might be worth explaining my reaction.

First off I should say that I believe we are all part of the human constellation and autistic traits are human traits, I suspect Len was trying to communicate to me that he shared this belief.  But the bit that he didn’t seem to understand is that his social anxiety is different from autistic social anxiety, for the simple reason that autistics’ social anxiety or even social terror is entirely rational.

Typically the largest part of social communication is non-verbal - autistic people do not understand this communication.  We just do not have the neurological equipment to decode and deal with social situations in a typical way; we fear entering territory that often proves treacherous for us. Comparing ordinary anxiety about social situations to autistic social anxiety is like comparing my concern about swimming across a river (I am a good swimmer)  to that of a poor swimmer or non-swimmer needing to cross the same river.  We  are facing the same situation but our ability to deal with it is vastly different. 

I might be anxious because of the currents and the fact I don’t know this particular river, I might not make it because of conditions beyond my control; but I do have the skills to cross given reasonable conditions and a history of successful river crossings. However, a non-swimmer without outside help is likely to drown regardless of the conditions – they don’t have the equipment for the task.  Their anxiety is of a different order of magnitude to my anxiety, their anxiety is grounded in the likelihood of a bad outcome, whereas my anxiety is priming me to be careful and achieve the best possible outcome. 

So while I appreciate efforts to empathise with the autistic reality they need to be grounded in knowledge of just how differently we might be experiencing the world. Maybe if I had expressed to Len how upset I was with his remark he would have had an experience all too familiar to many autistics – that of trying to interact positively with someone only to find that you have said something that has the opposite effect to what you intended.  Paradoxically in this case Len in trying to get close to one autistic sensibility mirrored Autistic experience demonstrating what my friend and colleague Damian Milton calls the Double Empathy Problem[2].


[1] As ever in this blog anyone referred to by first name only has had name and some details changed

[2] There is an article about this construct (unfortunately behind a paywall) here  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008#.UzkjGbePLIU

In the Summer 2013 edition of the National Autistic Society magazine “Communication” there is an article about Dr Peter Vermeulen and his belief that context blindness is a core attribute of autism.  He gives as an example a mother making pizza in the kitchen with her normal IQ autistic son.  The front door bell rings and the mother asks the son to open the door as her hands are full.  The son opens the back door.

I have a few issues with this example. First if the mother had said “answer the door” instead of “open the door” the request would have contained more information about what was required.  The issue might not be context blindness;  it could be mono-tropism – the ability to only attend to one stream of incoming information at a time, and the attendant difficulty in knowing which bits of sensory information to pay attention to.  Dr Vermeulens solution is the same as mine he just calls this “pushing the context  button” whereas I would say “be clear and concrete” .

However Dr Vermeulen recommends using Social Stories™, which are stories about specific situations which are popular and supposed to teach social skills (although research[i] suggests that this is ineffective). However it is not explained how these stories would address context blindness, in fact the criticism of them is that they do not address the context driven need for flexibility that is at the heart of meaningful social communication.

I am always puzzled why there seems to be this desire to attribute autism to a single cause (although I consider context blindness as a concept to be a symptom and not a cause) – it reminds me of the nature/nurture debate before it was realised that actually it is not nature or nurture but the way the two interact that impacts how an individuals' development unfolds.


[i] A meta-analysis of 62 studies was conducted to determine the efficacy of the intervention. Overall, Social Stories appear to have only a small clinical effect on behaviour.
Reynhout G., Carter M.(2011). Evaluation of the efficacy of Social Stories™ using three single subject metrics. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 5(2), pp. 885-900. Read Abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2010.10.003