Normal Is Not Neutral | Who Gets to Define Normal Communication?

Here's something I want you to sit with for a moment.

You have probably heard that autistic people struggle to understand social cues, read the room, and connect with others. It is one of the most repeated things said about autism in workplaces, training rooms, and professional development spaces.

What you have almost certainly not heard is this: neurotypical people are just as bad at understanding autistic people.

That is not a provocation. It’s a research finding. And it changes everything about how we think about communication, inclusion, and whose responsibility it is to bridge the gap.

The Experiment That Reframed the Conversation

In 2020, researcher Catherine Crompton and colleagues ran a study that produced a striking result. They tested how accurately information passed between people in a chain, comparing three groups: all neurotypical, all autistic, and mixed neurotype groups.

Autistic-to-autistic information transfer was just as accurate as neurotypical-to-neurotypical transfer. The breakdown happened specifically when neurotypes were mixed.

Read that again. The communication problem is not located inside autistic people. It shows up at the intersection between neurotypes. Both directions. Which means neurotypical people are also misreading, misinterpreting, and failing to understand autistic communication. They just aren’t told that. They aren’t labeled. And they aren’t asked to fix it.

If the communication gap is mutual, why does the entire burden of repair fall on one side?

Enter the Double Empathy Problem

This is the question researcher Damian Milton asked in his landmark 2012 paper, which introduced the concept of the Double Empathy Problem.

Milton's argument was direct: the traditional framing of autism as a social and empathy deficit places the problem entirely within the autistic person. But if neurotypical people consistently fail to understand autistic people too, then what we actually have is a mismatch between two different ways of experiencing and communicating about the world. Not a broken person. A broken bridge.

Another way to think about it is Mac vs PC operating systems woes. Both are functional, high-quality computer systems, but they run inherently different and sometimes incompatible software. It takes some workarounds for Mac and PC team members to collaborate. Or think about it as two different cultures, one high-context (where implicit communication is expected) and one low-context (where direct communication is expected). Each culture has its own valid norms for social interaction, and when they don’t understand each other’s cultural origin they can easily interpret their colleague as rude, unclear, or even unprofessional. 

Neither is broken. The mismatch-misunderstanding is the problem.

Professional environments, including our training rooms, our volunteer committees, our conference networking receptions, and our meeting norms, were designed by and for neurotypical people. That design is treated as neutral. It’s not.

The Accountability Gap

Here's where this becomes a workforce and professional development issue, not just a neuroscience conversation.

Neurodivergent professionals routinely spend significant energy learning to navigate neurotypical communication norms. They study social scripts, practice eye contact, rehearse small talk, mask their natural responses, and perform neurotypicality as a condition of professional acceptance. This labor is invisible, exhausting, and entirely one-directional.

Neurotypical professionals aren’t asked to learn anything in return.

They are not taught that direct communication is a valid style, not aggression. That a preference for written over verbal communication is a processing difference, not avoidance. That needing explicit instructions is not incompetence. That silence before responding is often deep thinking in progress.

When we design professional development, write job descriptions, run meetings, and build volunteer pathways, we are making constant assumptions about what normal communication looks like. Those assumptions are not neutral. They are neurotypical by default. And they systematically disadvantage people whose communication style is just as coherent, just as intelligent, and just as valuable. It simply does not match the unexamined standard.

Where in your professional environment does the burden of communication adaptation fall on neurodivergent people? And where are neurotypical norms treated as the invisible default?

What This Means for How We Design and Lead

The double empathy problem is not an argument that neurotypical people are bad or that autistic people are fine just as they are and need no support. It’s an argument that the bridge has to be built from both sides.

For learning designers, that means auditing whether our instruction assumes a default neurotypical learner. Whether participation formats privilege verbal, real-time, extemporaneous response over written, asynchronous, or structured contribution. Whether our facilitation models teach neurotypical communication styles as universal competencies.

For organizational leaders, it means examining whether your likeability and culture-fit criteria are actually proxies for neurotypical social performance. Whether your communication norms are creating invisible ceilings for some of your most capable people. Whether the professionals who are not advancing, not renewing, not returning to your events are quietly exhausted from building the whole bridge themselves.

Neuroinclusion is not about lowering standards. It is about examining whose standards we decided counted in the first place.

This post is part of Normal Is Not Neutral, a series peeling back the hidden norms that shape who gets to fully participate in professional life. In this series, I'm making the unseen visible so we can have an honest conversation about the rules we've agreed to without realizing it, and decide together whether we want different agreements. There's more to uncover. Follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to our enews so you don't miss the next installment.

Sources

Crompton, C.J. et al. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7).

Milton, D.E.M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the 'double empathy problem.' Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887.

Milton, D.E.M. (2022). The ‘double empathy problem’ ten years on. Autism. 26(8):1901-1903.