What do teachers often misunderstand about their autistic students?
In this video, Dr. Lucas Harrington explains how teachers may misinterpret autistic students’ direct communication or corrections as disrespect, when in reality these behaviors often reflect a genuine intention to be helpful, shaped by differences in communication styles and the double empathy problem.
Transcript
What do teachers often misunderstand about autistic students? This is of course, a huge question that could be a whole series, but I talk a lot in other videos about stress responses and how they're misunderstood. So I want to talk about something different here, situations where teachers might think that a student is being hostile and disrespectful when the student is actually just on a different wavelength and might even intend to be friendly.
The double empathy problem is a term to point out that empathy goes both ways. It's not that autistic people have a unique difficulty with perspective taking, but rather it's normal for people with very different experiences to have some trouble understanding each other. There's been research showing that autistic people often understand each other just as well as neurotypicals understand each other.
The problem starts when you're trying to communicate across basically a cultural barrier. For example, I got myself into trouble in grad school at times for debating with or correcting professors. It was taken as a sign of hostility, I guess, like I was trying to embarrass them. But the reality is, uh, exactly the opposite. I was actually trying to be helpful.
You know, I'm not gonna pretend that I'm always unbothered when somebody points out my mistakes. But if I was teaching, I would feel more embarrassed to find out later that I'd sent my students out with false information. And so I'd feel like a correction would be a favor to me.
So there is of course variation from person to person, but the classic autistic bluntness often comes from seeing clarity and accuracy as the best way to do right by people. So if an autistic student is getting under your skin, especially if it feels like they're disrespecting your authority, it can be really valuable to pause and ask if you can think of a possible non-hostile intention behind their behavior.
You can offer gentle guidance if their efforts aren't landing in this particular context, but please think of it as helping them to learn the local language rather than as setting them straight.
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Key Takeaways
- The double empathy problem reframes autism-related communication differences as a two-way cultural gap rather than a deficit on the autistic person's side, which shifts how educators interpret confusion and misread intent.
- Autistic students who debate, correct, or push back may be attempting to be genuinely helpful rather than disrespectful. Misreading this as hostility can seriously damage the student-teacher relationship.
- What looks like hostile or disrespectful behavior is frequently a cross-cultural communication mismatch. The most effective response is curiosity about intent rather than immediate consequences.
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