Autistic Peer-to-Peer Information Transfer is Highly Effective
The study that turned the double empathy problem from a conceptual claim into an empirical finding, using a diffusion-chain design of considerable elegance. A story is told to the first person in a chain, who tells the second, and so on down eight participants, with the quantity of retained detail measured at each step. Chains were composed of all autistic participants, all non-autistic participants, or the two alternating. Transfer was as effective along autistic chains as along non-autistic chains; only the mixed chains degraded. Since the autistic chains performed well, the result cannot be explained by an autistic deficit in communication or social processing, which is precisely the prediction the deficit account makes and precisely what did not happen. The difficulty is located at the interface between neurotypes, exactly as Milton argued. A companion finding from the same group is that autistic participants reported greater rapport in autistic pairings, so the effect is felt as well as measured. The limits are those of a laboratory task: modest samples, a single story-retelling paradigm, adults recruited in the UK, and information transfer standing in for the far messier business of working together over time. Replication and extension are underway rather than complete. It nonetheless remains the cleanest available demonstration that mixed-neurotype communication difficulty is a property of the pairing, which is the load-bearing claim under any argument that norms of expression should not be set unilaterally by the majority.
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