Misunderstandings occur on a regular basis: generally large ones, generally small ones. It’s a traditional a part of human communication, whether or not or not we’re autistic.
Now, I’m a giant fan of the longstanding BBC Radio rural cleaning soap The Archers (considered one of my autistic particular pursuits!) and a latest episode performed with a basic type of misunderstanding. Susan Carter is busy doing her grocery buying within the native grocery store. Her long-estranged brother Clive (who doesn’t stay within the village and hasn’t been seen for years) startles her together with his sudden method within the vegetable aisle. “Clive!”, says Susan, “What are you doing right here?” Clive’s reply? “A bit of buying my tea.”
The issue, on this misunderstanding, is context. Susan needs to know what Clive is doing right here: again within the village. For Susan, the context is an even bigger one. It’s about Clive showing again in her life and within the village after years of being absent. Clive solutions what he’s doing right here: on this constructing, the grocery store. For him the context is far more speedy. He offers a solution that pertains to the current second. Why is he right here, within the grocery store? Properly, he’s doing his searching for his tea…
Relevance idea is a lesser-known idea from the sphere of Linguistics (the examine of languages and human communication) that has rather a lot to say about how shared context (or, extra precisely, the issues we assume to be shared context) influences how we perceive each other. Relevance idea, to me, appears a extremely useful gizmo for understanding the difficulties in cross-neurotype communication (e.g., between autistic and non-autistic individuals).
Whereas misunderstandings occur on a regular basis, they’re far more frequent and have a way more important influence on the success of communication after they occur in cross-neurotype interactions (e.g. between autistic and non-autistic individuals). Traditionally, autistic individuals have been blamed for these communication breakdowns and described as not having the ability to “do” social communication, or perceive the views of different individuals. We now know that, in reality, this isn’t true. The issue is a two-way difficulty: with neurotypical individuals having simply as a lot issue understanding autistic individuals as autistic individuals have understanding neurotypical individuals. This two-way downside is commonly referred to the “double empathy downside.” Relevance idea may also help us perceive why the double empathy downside occurs (and, because of this, hopefully assist us navigate it higher).
The issue is that phrases on their very own don’t actually imply an entire bunch. This could appear a little bit of an odd concept at first. We now have dictionaries, the place we will lookup the meanings of phrases, proper? They need to imply one thing… However as we noticed within the instance above with Susan Carter and Clive Horrobin, you should utilize the phrase “right here” however it could relate to any variety of various things. There’s all the time a component of guesswork concerned if you’re making an attempt to work out what any person means.
In the event you’re not satisfied but, right here’s one other instance. Think about you’re sitting watching TV with a buddy or member of the family. You may see them leaning ahead and frowning and also you realise they most likely can’t hear it very effectively. You see them patting the couch round them feeling for one thing, then they ask you: “have you ever bought the flibbertigibbet?” Whereas ‘flibbertigibbet’ is a (albeit scrumptious to say) made-up phrase than has no that means and may’t be regarded up in a dictionary, you’ll be able to most likely work out fairly rapidly that they’re asking you for the remote-control (to show up the quantity).
Relevance idea tells us that with a view to appropriately guess (or: perceive) what somebody means, you want to have the ability to appropriately work out what they needed you to know (or: their ‘intentions’). You want to have the ability to think about what context is most “related” for the particular person talking, and if you’re the speaker, that you must have an concept of what essentially the most relevance context and interpretation can be in your listener.
This feels like a whole lot of arduous work, but it surely’s one thing that occurs intuitively and at high-speed on a regular basis with out you realising. In line with relevance idea, our brains depend on shortcuts (referred to as ‘heuristics’) that assist us determine essentially the most related interpretation every time we hear or learn one thing. The heuristic (or mind shortcut) goes one thing like this:
Probably the most related interpretation is the one which prices the least psychological vitality to course of, whereas speaking essentially the most new data.
Everytime you hear or learn one thing, your thoughts will run via the varied doable interpretations, stopping on the first one which fulfills the recipe above.
Generally, this calculation works very well and permits us to speak at pace, appropriately understanding what individuals imply, sentence after sentence, after sentence, after sentence… Nevertheless it depends on us (roughly) appropriately gauging how a lot psychological vitality it would take the opposite particular person to course of what we’ve stated, and this depends on us figuring out what we’ve got in frequent (and due to this fact what is apparent to the opposite particular person and simple for them to course of).
The extra comparable two persons are, the extra probably it’s that our minds can be organised in similar-ish methods and that we’ll have similar-ish methods of understanding issues. Relevance idea describes this by way of us having bigger ‘mutual cognitive environments’ (or, in different phrases, there’s extra overlap in the best way our minds work). The heuristic/shortcut described above does its calculation of relevance based mostly on how a lot we suppose we each know that we’ve got in frequent (or, how a lot we expect we each know is in our mutual cognitive surroundings).
And herein lies the issue: Autistic and non-autistic individuals have very alternative ways of processing data. They usually have very alternative ways of pondering, very completely different sensory experiences that form the best way they see the world and, because of this, probably have very completely different ‘cognitive environments’. Issues that could be very apparent for an autistic particular person is probably not apparent for a non-autistic particular person, and vice versa.
The excellent news is that (after all!) autistic and non-autistic individuals can perceive one another, it simply would possibly take a bit extra effort to get there.
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