Misunderstandings happen all the time: sometimes big ones, sometimes small ones. It’s a normal part of human communication, whether or not we are autistic.
Now, I’m a big fan of the longstanding BBC Radio rural soap The Archers (one of my autistic special interests!) and a recent episode played with a classic kind of misunderstanding. Susan Carter is busy doing her grocery shopping in the local supermarket. Her long-estranged brother Clive (who doesn’t live in the village and hasn’t been seen for years) startles her with his unexpected approach in the vegetable aisle. “Clive!”, says Susan, “What are you doing here?” Clive’s answer? “A bit of shopping for my tea.”
The problem, in this misunderstanding, is context. Susan wants to know what Clive is doing here: back in the village. For Susan, the context is a bigger one. It’s about Clive appearing back in her life and in the village after years of being absent. Clive answers what he is doing here: in this building, the supermarket. For him the context is much more immediate. He gives an answer that relates to the present moment. Why is he here, in the supermarket? Well, he’s doing his shopping for his tea…
Relevance theory is a lesser-known theory from the field of Linguistics (the study of languages and human communication) that has a lot to say about how shared context (or, more accurately, the things we assume to be shared context) influences how we understand one another. Relevance theory, to me, seems a really useful tool for understanding the difficulties in cross-neurotype communication (e.g., between autistic and non-autistic people).
While misunderstandings happen all the time, they’re much more common and have a much more significant impact on the success of communication when they happen in cross-neurotype interactions (e.g. between autistic and non-autistic people). Historically, autistic people have been blamed for these communication breakdowns and described as not being able to “do” social communication, or understand the perspectives of other people. We now know that, in fact, this isn’t true. The problem is a two-way issue: with neurotypical people having just as much difficulty understanding autistic people as autistic people have understanding neurotypical people. This two-way problem is often referred to the “double empathy problem.” Relevance theory can help us understand why the double empathy problem happens (and, as a result, hopefully help us navigate it better).
The problem is that words on their own don’t really mean a whole bunch. This can seem a bit of a strange idea at first. We have dictionaries, where we can look up the meanings of words, right? They must mean something… But as we saw in the example above with Susan Carter and Clive Horrobin, you can use the word “here” but it can relate to any number of different things. There’s always an element of guesswork involved when you’re trying to work out what somebody means.
If you’re not convinced yet, here’s another example. Imagine you’re sitting watching TV with a friend or family member. You can see them leaning forward and frowning and you realise they probably can’t hear it very well. You see them patting the sofa around them feeling for something, then they ask you: “have you got the flibbertigibbet?” While ‘flibbertigibbet’ is a (albeit delicious to say) made-up word than has no meaning and can’t be looked up in a dictionary, you can probably work out quite quickly that they’re asking you for the remote-control (to turn up the volume).
Relevance theory tells us that in order to correctly guess (or: understand) what someone means, you need to be able to correctly work out what they wanted you to know (or: their ‘intentions’). You need to be able to imagine what context is most “relevant” for the person speaking, and when you’re the speaker, you need to have an idea of what the most relevance context and interpretation will be for your listener.
This sounds like a lot of hard work, but it’s something that happens intuitively and at high-speed all the time without you realising. According to relevance theory, our brains rely on shortcuts (called ‘heuristics’) that help us identify the most relevant interpretation whenever we hear or read something. The heuristic (or brain shortcut) goes something like this:
The most relevant interpretation is the one that costs the least mental energy to process, while communicating the most new information.
Whenever you hear or read something, your mind will run through the various possible interpretations, stopping at the first one that fulfills the recipe above.
In most cases, this calculation works really well and allows us to communicate at speed, correctly working out what people mean, sentence after sentence, after sentence, after sentence… But it relies on us (more or less) correctly gauging how much mental energy it will take the other person to process what we’ve said, and this relies on us knowing what we have in common (and therefore what is obvious to the other person and easy for them to process).
The more similar two people are, the more likely it is that our minds will be organised in similar-ish ways and that we’ll have similar-ish ways of understanding things. Relevance theory describes this in terms of us having larger ‘mutual cognitive environments’ (or, in other words, there’s more overlap in the way our minds work). The heuristic/shortcut described above does its calculation of relevance based on how much we think we both know that we have in common (or, how much we think we both know is in our mutual cognitive environment).
And herein lies the problem: Autistic and non-autistic people have very different ways of processing information. They often have very different ways of thinking, very different sensory experiences that shape the way they see the world and, as a result, likely have very different ‘cognitive environments’. Things that may be very obvious for an autistic person may not be obvious for a non-autistic person, and vice versa.
The good news is that (of course!) autistic and non-autistic people can understand each other, it just might take a little more effort to get there.
