This article was written in collaboration with Tristan Lavender.

Most Western cultures teach specific rules for expressing empathy. Do these sound familiar? Don’t try to fix the problem. Don’t offer advice. Don’t respond to someone’s story with a similar story of your own. Instead, listen and stay with the other person’s experience. Active listening guidance sometimes teaches these rules explicitly (University of Iowa, n.d.).

That can be helpful advice. But when we treat empathy as something that can only be expressed according to a fixed set of rules, we leave no room for people who convey care and concern differently. For autistic people specifically, that means having their ways of expressing empathy misread or dismissed.

Empathy Is Culturally Shaped

Cultural psychology has clearly established that perceptions and expected forms of caring vary across cultures. In one study, European Americans reported providing more emotion-focused than problem-focused support, while Japanese participants showed exactly the opposite (Chen et al., 2012). Research has also distinguished explicit support, such as seeking advice and emotional comfort, from implicit support, such as finding relief in the fact of connection to valued social groups. In one series of studies, Asian and Asian-American study participants benefited more from implicit support, while European Americans benefited more from explicit support (Taylor et al., 2007).

In other words, how people communicate and receive care is culturally shaped, which makes the assumption that there is “one correct human way to empathize” highly dubious.

Yet this is precisely the standard that autistic people are held to when differences in how they express empathy are framed as “deficient.”

How Autistic Expressions of Empathy Can Be Misinterpreted

Autism is both a neurodevelopmental difference and, for many autistic people, the foundation of a shared culture. Autistic people have formed communities based on shared experiences, identities, communication styles, and ways of making meaning that scholars define as cultures (Botha et al., 2022; Davidson, 2008). How they express themselves, including how they show empathy, is shaped by both their neurological wiring and cultural learning.

To be clear: many autistic people can find it genuinely difficult to recognize or respond to what someone else is feeling, even when they care about them deeply. This may be especially true for autistic people with alexithymia, a difficulty identifying and describing emotions that is considerably more common in autistic than non-autistic (allistic) people (Kinnaird et al., 2019). But as Milton’s double empathy problem suggests, the difficulty may not be entirely one-sided, and non-autistic people may struggle with empathy toward autistic people (Milton, 2012).

Autistic people may express empathy in ways that don’t match non-autistic conventions. When others don’t recognize those differences, they may incorrectly assume that autistic people are indifferent to their feelings. Or, as some autism researchers have put it, autistic people may seem to lack empathy when they are simply following a different response script from the non-autistic majority (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020).

An autistic person may hear about someone’s problem and immediately start looking for a solution. Conventional advice may call this “fixing instead of empathizing,” or “doing empathy wrong.” But the intended message may be: You are hurting; I want to help.

Someone may respond to a story with a similar experience of their own. This can be interpreted as “making it about yourself.” But it may just as easily mean: I understand. I have been in a similar situation too.

Other ways in which autistic people communicate can also be misconstrued. Providing detailed information can mean: I found something that might help you. Directness can communicate: I care enough to tell you what I actually think. And someone who becomes quiet during an emotionally intense interaction may not be indifferent; they may be overwhelmed and need time to process.

None of these behaviors is uniquely autistic, universal among autistic people, or interpreted in the same way by everyone. Problem-solving can be intrusive or welcome. Personal stories can derail a conversation or provide validation. Personal context and impact matter.

But so does cultural interpretation. When an autistic person’s ways of communicating are consistently misread, the consequences can extend far beyond a single interaction. An autistic employee may end up being labeled as “difficult” and passed over for promotion, when what looks like emotional insensitivity is actually a form of care, expressed as problem-solving.

For decades, autistic people have been measured by how well they recognize and respond to non-autistic social and emotional cues. A question we haven’t asked enough is: How well do non-autistic people recognize autistic expressions of empathy?

Rather than assuming that someone doesn’t care because their care arrived in an unfamiliar form, we can become curious about what that behavior means to them. We can ask what they were trying to communicate, rather than assuming we already know. We can leave room for the possibility that their intention was different from our interpretation. Equally, we can try to be more explicit about what kind of support is most helpful to us, instead of expecting the other person to guess.

Perhaps the ultimate test of empathy is recognizing that someone else may express it differently.