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I’ve heard for a long time that autistic people don’t understand social norms...

Twitter thread by @MaxieMoosie (via Nitter)

I’ve heard for a long time that autistic people don’t understand social norms, and I think that’s sort of accurate, but an oversimplification.

I think there’s two main reasons:

1) Autistic people don’t learn the way NTs do.

2) Our brains demand things to make sense.

To point one:

I’m not sure how NTs are taught social norms. I’d imagine simple exposure and they imitate from a young age until it seems natural. Naturally, they can intuit expectations because everyone’s received the same indoctrination.

Autistic brains don’t take it that way.

Autistic people will try and imitate, but if it feels unnatural we simply won’t bother. It’s too stressful. As kids who haven’t been ABA’d, we won’t start imitating until it’s clear we should “just get it.”

With ABA, it’s imitation as a trauma response.

To point two, it’s hard to describe to an allistic person how stressful it is to do something or subscribe to a belief that makes no fucking sense.

The autistic brain craves a logical explanation of all the inner workings and context which is never supplied with social norms.

If you need a firm handshake and regular eye contact when meeting someone, the autistic person will ask, “Why?”

Well it shows confidence and respect.

“I’m interviewing as a software engineer, why do I need to show confidence with a death grip? Shouldn’t you just see my code?”

If you are hiring a software engineer, you want someone who can translate the design goals into usable code very efficiently and communicate with other team members.

Why the fuck does it matter that I can talk about beer with the boss? How is that relevant?

An autistic person needs to know why drinking the right beers would be at all relevant to a job that is not related to beer making or bartending. Or why people think a good strong handshake is indicative of anything other than dense metacarpal bones.

If this reasoning is explained explicitly we can better go along with it, but nobody explains this explicitly because it’s just so obvious. Obviously.

Earlier this year, I administered a citizen’s dx because someone asked, “Why wouldn’t you want to know what you did wrong?”

Autistic brains work on things making sense and we learn best when things are outlined explicitly. So without someone outright stating why it’s frowned upon, we will assume saying, “Hey this is exactly how you turned me off and how you can improve,” would be welcome feedback.

People don’t think to explain that because it should be obvious, obviously. So instead we just get, “Uh wow. Asshole.”

But to us, we were kind and offered honesty and were called an asshole. It literally breaks our brain because that makes no damn sense.

Like imagine whenever you ask for anything, you say please and thank you without fail. “Hey can you please get this report to me?” you get the report and say, “Thank you.” You do it a thousand times.

Then you overhear people talking about what a creep you are. Why?

Apparently, you thank people for everything when they do something for you, and that’s creeping people out, but nobody ever told you because they thought it was obvious and you’re just an asshole.

“But Max, thanking people IS polite!”

That’s my point. Please and thank you is so ingrained that it’s something you never question and you suddenly learn it’s a problem, but nobody will tell you because to them, it’s your fault for not knowing.

And when you say, “Thank you,” everyone just nods and goes about their day.

If that hypothetical seems ridiculous, it’s a pretty common occurrence with autistic people. Not from please and thank you, autistic folk are very good about that because those rules are taught explicitly in elementary school, and the rules are clear cut and make sense. Use please to show it’s a request, say thank you to indicate you are grateful and appreciate what they did. It’s also an easy tool to use with masking because it’s generally not stressful since the rules are clear, and contrary to my example, nobody is freaked out over “thanks.”

So anyway, I don’t think it’s so much autistic people not understanding social rules as an inherent neurological trait, but they’re not taught in a way that’s compatible with autistic learning, and a lot of the rules just make no fucking sense.