For our May 24 Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing the Keynote by Dr. Damian Milton, delivered at the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) 2026 annual meeting: “Bridging the Gap: Exploring the Current Empirical Evidence Relating to the Double Empathy Problem.”
The Double Empathy Problem is not an abstract theory. It is a reorientation. It moves the problem out of the autistic person’s mind and places it where it actually lives: in the interaction between differently disposed social actors, shaped by power, situated in the unequal distribution of whose ways of being get treated as the default.
This is Stimpunks ground. Broken systems, not broken people. The problem is not inside us. The problem is in the mismatch — and in who has the power to define the mismatch as someone else’s deficit.
I may lack a social imagination, but I have a sociological one.
— Damian Milton, INSAR 2026 Keynote
Milton developed the concept of the Double Empathy Problem in 2012, but the ideas took shape much earlier — in his own experience navigating a world that found him deficient. His school reports from the 1980s offer a portrait that will feel familiar to many in this community: “it does not appear that Damian is very bright.” By 1999, before he had encountered the word “neurodiversity,” he was writing that “where disorder begins is entirely down to social convention, and where one decides to draw the line across the spectrum.” He had arrived at the neurodiversity paradigm on his own.
His son Nye’s autism diagnosis in 2005 pulled him fully into autism studies. His own diagnosis followed in 2009. The Double Empathy Problem emerged from the intersection of his lived experience, his training as a sociologist, and his work in a parent support group where he kept noticing what was missing from the dominant framing: the other direction. Communication goes two ways.
Grant me the dignity of meeting me on my own terms. Recognize that we are equally alien to each other, that my ways of being are not a merely damaged version of yours.
— Jim Sinclair (1993), cited by Damian Milton
Milton describes Jim Sinclair as the first autistic person he knowingly made contact with — and Sinclair’s graciousness in that meeting, and his introduction to Autistic Network International, as formative. The Double Empathy Problem did not come from a laboratory. It came from a community.
The core concept: social interaction difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are not located solely in the autistic person. They arise from a mutual mismatch — a disjuncture in how differently disposed people perceive and navigate the world. Both parties lack insight into the other. The problem is bidirectional, and it is worse in initial encounters with strangers than in long-term relationships where genuine theory of another’s mind can be built over time.
This is not a polite accommodation of deficit framing. It is a direct challenge to it. The theory of mind deficit hypothesis — the claim that autistic people lack the capacity to understand others’ mental states — locates the problem in one brain. The Double Empathy Problem says: look at the interaction. Look at the power dynamics. Look at who gets to define what counts as normal social understanding.
The breakdown in interaction between autistic and non-autistic people is not solely located in the mind of the autistic person.
— Damian Milton, INSAR 2026 Keynote
What does the research actually show? Milton surveys the empirical evidence: studies consistently find that autistic-to-autistic interactions produce better outcomes on measures like information transfer and rapport than mixed neurotype interactions. Non-autistic observers detect and demonstrate the Double Empathy Problem when watching interactions involving autistic people. First impression research shows autistic adults are rated less favorably by non-autistic observers — and yet meta-perception research reveals that autistic people consistently overestimate how positively they will be perceived.
Milton asks the room to sit with that last finding. Autistic people — who navigate daily a world of social exclusion, bullying, and misreading — still expect to be seen well. Shannon Des Roches Rosa, writing for Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, noted a response to this finding from the Bluesky community that reframes it entirely: not as poor self-assessment but as “a near-miraculous ability to see your own positive potential despite constant negative feedback.” That is not a deficit. That is resilience.
95% of people don’t understand me. Adults don’t stop bullying me.
— Autistic young people, ages 10–11, Autism Education Trust consultation (2012), cited by Milton
Research on misunderstandings within families adds another layer. When autistic people and their family members were asked about the causes of communication difficulties, family members attributed the problem to an impairment in the autistic person. Autistic participants reflected on both themselves and the other person. The people supposedly lacking in theory of mind were the ones holding the more complex, bidirectional account.
Helen Edgar, Co-Creative Director of Stimpunks, has extended the Double Empathy Problem into what she calls the DEEP: the Double Empathy Extreme Problem — Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Political. The concept names something the DEP’s sociological framing points toward but doesn’t always make explicit: the gap is not merely a cognitive mismatch. It is felt in the body. It is shaped by ecology — by the sensory and relational environments we move through. It is political — structured by the same power dynamics that produce alienation, exclusion, and burnout.
The DEEP gap can break people at their core, leaving them fragmented, disconnected, disoriented and disembodied, feeling like they’re in a void space.
— Helen Edgar, “The Double Empathy Problem is DEEP,” Autistic Realms
Edgar draws on phenomenology and embodied cognition to argue that the DEP operates through bodyminds — not just through misread social signals but through accumulated somatic experience, through environments calibrated for a different kind of nervous system, through the compounding weight of never quite fitting. This connects the Double Empathy Problem directly to autistic burnout, to the chronic health disparities documented in neurodivergent communities, and to the work of building spaces — Cavendish Space, our community — that reduce the mismatch rather than demanding the autistic person overcome it.
Sam Fellowes (2026), writing in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, raises a different kind of challenge — not to the Double Empathy Problem itself but to the methodology of its empirical support. After reviewing twenty studies that claim to provide evidence for the DEP, Fellowes finds that most are not directly measuring cognitive or affective empathy. They measure rapport, ease of interaction, information transfer, first impressions — real and meaningful things, but not empathy in the specific technical sense the field uses. Most interaction setups run five minutes or less, with strangers, using tasks that don’t require perspective-taking or emotional response.
This is not a takedown. Fellowes is careful to state that “this review has not argued that autistic people have an internal reduction in capacity for cognitive and affective empathy.” The studies haven’t disproved the deficit model — but they haven’t tested cognitive and affective empathy directly either. The research is young. The methodology is catching up to the theory. Fellowes’s suggestions for future research — longer interactions, naturalistic settings, measures that actually track perspective-taking and emotional resonance — point toward a richer empirical account, not a retreat from the DEP’s core insight.
Milton himself, in the keynote, acknowledged the 2024 Livingston et al. critique and his response is instructive: the Double Empathy Problem “originated in phenomenological experience and sociological theory.” It was never a psychological science derivation chain. It was a way of naming what autistic people already knew about how their social reality works.
Alienation and anomie cause much harm to autistic people. Therefore, inclusion and participation should not be seen as a tick box exercise, as the consequences of a lack of such can be devastating.
— Damian Milton, INSAR 2026 Keynote
Milton closes with what this all means practically. It means building relationships and humility in our interpretations of each other. Understanding different dispositions. Engaging with abilities and interests, not only difficulties. Reducing the imposition of social expectations. Avoiding tokenism. Ceding power. This is how most people would like to be treated. Translation into practice does not require waiting for a perfect derivation chain. It requires treating autistic people as people.
And it requires participation: autistic people setting the agenda, designing the methodologies, building the frameworks. This is why Milton chairs the Participatory Autism Research Collective. This is why Stimpunks exists.
When I’m in an environment I feel comfortable in, with people who are kind and tolerant, and doing the things that I enjoy, then I’m as happy as the next person. So surely the problem is a lack of fit with the environment rather than something inside my brain that needs to be fixed.
— Research participant, cited by Milton
We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole selves.
Join Us
Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, May 24. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.
We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.
Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.
Main Takeaways
The problem is not in the autistic person’s mind — it is in the interaction. The Double Empathy Problem relocates social difficulty from an internal deficit to a bidirectional mismatch between differently disposed social actors. Both parties lack insight into the other. This is not a softened version of the deficit framing. It is a structural challenge to it.
The mismatch is situated in power. When non-autistic ways of being are treated as the default and autistic ways of being are treated as deficits, the mismatch is no longer neutral. One side of the gap is asked to cross it alone. The Double Empathy Problem names this as a social and political condition, not a neurological one.
The research supports the DEP — and the methodology is still maturing. Studies consistently find that autistic-to-autistic interactions produce better rapport and information transfer than mixed neurotype interactions. But recent methodological review (Fellowes, 2026) notes that most existing studies are not directly measuring cognitive or affective empathy. The research is young. The core insight is sound. The empirical tools are still developing.
Autistic people are more empathic about misunderstanding than those around them. When autistic people and non-autistic family members were asked about communication breakdowns, autistic participants reflected on both sides. Family members attributed the difficulty entirely to the autistic person. The Double Empathy Problem shows up in who has the more complete account.
The gap is felt in the body — it is DEEP. Helen Edgar’s extension of the DEP as Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Political names what the original sociological framing points toward: the mismatch doesn’t only happen cognitively. It accumulates in the soma. It is shaped by environments, sensory conditions, and systems. It contributes to burnout, fragmentation, and disembodiment. Addressing it requires more than better communication — it requires building different spaces.
Overestimating positive perception is resilience, not deficit. Research shows autistic people consistently expect to be received more warmly than they are. Read against the backdrop of chronic exclusion, bullying, and misreading, this is not a measurement error. It is the stubborn persistence of an orientation toward connection.
Inclusion and participation are not optional extras. Alienation and anomie cause documented harm to autistic people. Belonging is not a wellness amenity. It is a structural condition for human flourishing. Milton’s practical implications — humility, rapport, strengths-based engagement, reduced social imposition — are how most people would like to be treated. They do not require a completed derivation chain to implement.
Autistic people must set the agenda. The Double Empathy Problem emerged from autistic experience and sociological theory, not from the research establishment. The Participatory Autism Research Collective, now 11 years old, models what it looks like to build knowledge from the inside. Nothing about us without us is not a procedural requirement. It is an epistemological one.
Related Glossary Entries
Double Empathy Problem — Milton’s 2012 framework positing that social interaction difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people arise from a mutual mismatch between differently disposed social actors, not from a deficit in the autistic person alone. The problem is bidirectional, relational, and situated within dynamics of social power.
Spiky Profile — The pattern of uneven cognitive and functional abilities common in neurodivergent people, where pronounced strengths in some areas coexist with pronounced difficulties in others. The Double Empathy Problem helps explain how the spiky profile emerges and deepens over time: positive experiences build peaks, and repeated frustration or rejection embeds avoidance.
Epistemic Injustice — Harm done to someone in their capacity as a knower. The deficit model of autism enacts epistemic injustice when it overrides autistic people’s accounts of their own experience with clinical interpretations that locate the problem inside them.
Minority Stress — The documented mechanism by which hostile social environments translate into physical and mental health disparities. The chronic experience of being misread, excluded, and required to mask is not metaphorical stress. It is a physical load.
Neurodiversity Paradigm — The framework that treats neurological variation as a natural feature of human diversity rather than a collection of disorders to be corrected. The Double Empathy Problem is one of its foundational empirical and theoretical supports.
Related Writing
Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms extends the Double Empathy Problem into explicitly embodied and political territory in “The Double Empathy Problem is DEEP”. Where Milton’s keynote surveys the sociological and empirical case, Helen traces how the DEP operates through bodyminds — through sensory systems, accumulated somatic experience, and the ecology of environments never designed for neurodivergent nervous systems. Her DEEP framework — Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Political — names what the original theory points toward without always making explicit. The two pieces are in direct conversation.
Shannon Des Roches Rosa’s write-up of the keynote at Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism offers sharp editorial framing alongside the content summary — including the Bluesky response that reframes the meta-perception finding as resilience rather than deficit, and Rosa’s own brief, pointed commentary on the “magic wand” question that closes the Q&A.
For those who want to go deeper on the methodological questions, Sam Fellowes’s 2026 critical methodology review in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders — “Cognitive Empathy, Affective Empathy and Empirical Research on the Double Empathy Problem” — is a useful companion. It is not a refutation. It is a careful accounting of what the existing empirical studies have and haven’t measured, and a set of suggestions for where the research needs to go next.
Reflection Questions
Milton uses personal stories throughout the keynote — his school reports, his son Nye, his daughters Flo and Meg, the Autscape photograph. These questions are an invitation to meet the material where it lives: in experience, not only in theory.
On the location of the problem
The deficit model says the difficulty is inside the autistic person — a missing mechanism, a broken mirror, a mind that can’t fully read other minds. The Double Empathy Problem says: look at the interaction. Look at the mismatch. Look at who has to do the crossing. Where have you felt the problem being located — in you, in the space between, in the systems around you? What changes when the location shifts?
On being misread
Milton describes what Garfinkel called breaching experiments — moments where the expected social reality breaks down, and most people quickly rebuild their sense of normalcy and move on. For many autistic people, he says, this kind of breach is an everyday experience, often from a very young age: the realization that other people really don’t mirror and think the way you do. What has that realization cost you? What has it given you?
On the research gap
Fellowes’s critique isn’t that the Double Empathy Problem is wrong — it’s that most studies supporting it haven’t yet measured what they claim to measure. The methodology is young. What does it mean to you that the empirical tools are still catching up to what many autistic people have known from lived experience for decades? How do you hold the difference between “the research doesn’t yet prove it” and “we know this is true”?
On the DEEP
Helen Edgar argues that the double empathy gap is not only cognitive — it is felt in the body, shaped by ecology, and political in its structure. Where do you feel the gap somatically? What environments have reduced it for you? What environments have deepened it? What would it take to build more spaces that close the gap rather than demanding you bridge it alone?
On being seen well
Research shows autistic people consistently expect to be received more warmly than they are. In a world that has often confirmed the opposite, many of us still orient toward connection. What does your own experience of this look like? Is there something you need to protect in that orientation — and something you need to grieve?
On what collaboration actually means
Milton ends with a call for autistic people to set the agenda — in research, in practice, in the design of strategies and methodologies. Stimpunks is built on this premise. What would it mean for the Double Empathy Problem to inform not just how researchers study autism but how you design the spaces, relationships, and systems in your own life? What would it mean for the non-autistic people in your life to take the bidirectional mismatch seriously — to do their half of the work?
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