Neurodivergent folks who want to learn more about hidden meanings - tumblr is not a terribly reliable source, but you know what IS useful? Books by linguists! Linguists are often talking about how implied communication differs across culture and subculture.

To get a sample of this, I think it’s often super interesting to start with the work of Deborah Tannen talking about “the New York Jewish conversational style” (which is not unique to New York Jews” or “high involvement vs high considerateness” styles.

It’s good to take a look at linguists rather than just looking at this through the lens of neurology/psychology. The way we communicate is so thoroughly influenced by the norms and approaches we grow up in - our communication is a cocktail of nature and nurture.

And the people you will meet and the people you will want to connect with all come from slightly different cultural backgrounds - a family can be a micro culture with its own communication norms too.

Some people will go their whole lives assuming incorrectly that everyone communicates Good Ways or Bad Ways; reading about patterns observed in linguistic research is useful because it will help you notice what functional benefits come from different approaches.

Neurotypicals sometimes also lament that others are failing to “say what they mean”, because there are actually lots of different ways to say what you mean in different cultures!

Neurotypicals often misunderstand each other BUT DONT REALISE IT BECAUSE THEY ASSUME THEYRE “GOOD” AT COMMUNICATION. This is a habit that becomes easier to break if you’ve lived within multiple different cultures/subcultures, or dig into linguistics.

If you read work by linguists you’ll also often see the gaps in works by psychologists talking about neurotypical vs neurodivergent communication “deficits”, the places where those approaches could be better fleshed out.

There is a really important theory article by @milton_damian about the idea of “the double empathy problem” - tagging Damian here means I’m taking a gamble at trying to briefly explain it bc he could explain better, but I’ll give it a go.

In brief: the double empathy problem is the idea that when an autistic person & a neurotypical person meet, there may be a “failure” or confusion on both ends of their exchange, bc both may fail to empathise correctly with one another due to differing experiences or even values.

When communication breaks down, the breakdown is often attributed to the autistic person when more rightly it should be understood as a mutual error, similar to the kinds of cultural misunderstandings people encounter when travelling or migrating.

Because neurotypical people often get the message that they’re inherently good communicators, and autistic people have been taught that every social interaction that goes wrong is their fault, the dual misunderstanding or dissatisfaction gets misattributed to the autistic.

But I referred earlier to a question of “values”, not just styles, being relevant to the double empathy problem - and goodness gracious, this gets complicated fast, but I think perhaps the easiest example, and the one that takes me where I want to go in this thread, is touch.

In brief the point I’m going to make is “there might be certain things that suck more or less for us based on our neurology, and that affects what we think is good and bad, but so does culture and learning and context, and that’s why you should look at the work of linguists”.

In a lot of cultures, but not all, touch is considered an acceptable and warm way of showing affection even to relative strangers. (This is pre-COVID - who knows what cultural changes might be wrought by a big world-changing event like this one!)

For many (but NOT all) autistic people, sensory stuff, or stuff about the way the world is experienced as unpredictable, or stuff related to past poor experiences, can all contribute to a very strong preference NOT to be touched as a default greeting.

And that preference can lead to developing a belief or value - “it is bad to touch other people early in your acquaintance - it’s rude and inconsiderate”.

But those autistic people who hold this value aren’t the only people who carry this value. Some cultures agree with this value, and some SUBcultures do too. That can make some cultures and subcultures more comfortable for some autistic people because of the overlap of preferences

(And neurodivergent people of all kinds are not born outside of culture! Online writing about neurodivergence is excessively dominated by white people, and diagnosis is easier for white people to access, but culture and individual personality aren’t flattened by neurology.)

Ugh, I’m verging into speaking for autistic people which isn’t my place (note my bio), but what I’m really trying to say is - versions of the double empathy problem occur ALL THE TIME between neurotypicals w different values or from diff cultures or carrying diff expectations.

I despise “men are from Mars women are from Venus” stuff, but there is an INCREDIBLY interesting Deborah Tannen book from the 90s called “That’s Not What I Meant”, which is about the ways that men and women get socialised differently and then proceed to misunderstand each other.

Reading linguistics - especially cultural and cross-cultural linguistics - is good for everyone’s understanding of the social world, because it adds extra layers to our theorising about why a misunderstanding might happen, and thus gives us more tools to resolve misunderstandings

But it’s also good for us because it stops us acting like our inherent and unchanging natures are the reason for all misunderstandings, or treating neurotypical or neurodivergent people as all having the same linguistic quirks of implied communication.

Also a really important caveat on that Tannen book here. I acknowledge I haven’t been back to it in some time - and some gendered patterns of communication may be culturally normalised but are also really really fucked up in terms of the ways they play out. https://twitter.com/taliaringer/status/1309606126384607232

And this too. The process of getting to know someone really well, imo, can involve a mutual effort to find communication norms in a relationship that are LESS confusing for both people. Ongoing deliberate opacity in a chosen relationship of closeness can really suck. https://twitter.com/TaliaRinger/status/1309606731526275072

Just because a norm is a norm doesn’t mean you have to like it or want it in your relationships. Just because a culture says something is good doesn’t mean you have to run with it. It’s more about knowing that you can take issue w culture, not just brains.

Also an important thing to keep an eye out for in linguistics - sometimes you’ll run into attitudes of cultural supremacy or exoticism, leading to waaay insufficient nuance/bs. (Think of all the anthropologists who are all “ah yes the Mysterious East, Honour, Whispers, Honour.”)

Linguists are just as fallible and influenced by their own biases as psychologists or neurologists. This is more about having a chance to consider communication norms from more angles and in more ways, to reduce the belief that all communication issues are Because Neurotype.

The thing is, a useful insight about communication can come from anywhere - so I don’t even mean “tumblr is inherently unreliable” or “linguistics has all the answers”. But I think it’s good to be a little dubious of anything that says “all NTs communicate like this”.

And another thing is just ... in your own interpersonal relationships, you’re allowed to deliberately co-create communication norms that work for you. You don’t have to stick with what you learned, if other ways would work better for you.

Hmm people liked this thread enough that now I have to definitely actually read more linguists rather than just liking them a lot and reading a few so far. Lots of reasons to do that anyway but people asking for my linguist recommendations is really bringing it home.

For those trying to figure out where to start when looking at linguistics https://twitter.com/tanchunkiet/status/1310068183877861376?s=20