‘It seems that it is not just whether someone is Autistic or not that determines whether an interaction is successful…’

Today on the blog, Dr Catherine Crompton shares a unique insight into some of her team’s recent research on ‘information transfer within and between Autistic and non-Autistic people’. The results may surprise you!

Autistic and non-Autistic people communicate differently.  Historically, Autistic social differences have been considered as ‘deficits’ to be fixed. Many assumed that non-Autistic people would be better at interacting with Autistic people, as they would be able to support interactions, conversations, and relationships. We see this, for example, through the pairing of neurotypical pupils with autistic pupils at school in order to help Autistic pupils ‘fit in’.  

However, many Autistic people, such as Jim Sinclair, American Autistic activist and writer, have long since said that for Autistic people, interacting with other Autistic people can be more comfortable, easy and natural compared with interacting with non-Autistic people.  

A few years ago, we decided to see if we could explore this idea – that autistic communication is easier – in an experimental study (Crompton et al., 2020). We designed a research project using something called a ‘diffusion chain’ method. This involves a group of participants coming into the lab, and testing how well they share information from one individual to another, mimicking real world information sharing. This method lets us see how information degrades across multiple interactions. We had three different types of diffusion chain: the first included all Autistic participants; the second included all non-Autistic participants, and the third included Autistic and non-Autistic participants, who were arranged in alternating order. We told the first person in each chain a story, they then shared this with the second person in the chain and so on.  

We found that Autistic chains of participants share information just as well as non-Autistic chains of participants. We found that mixed chains, that alternated between Autistic and non-Autistic people, shared significantly less information.  

This indicates that breakdowns in interactions seem to happen more between Autistic and non-Autistic people, and that autistic people communicate information just as well as non-Autistic people, when they’re with other Autistic people. This also aligned with a qualitative study that we did (Crompton, Hallett, et al., 2020), which found that Autistic people really enjoyed spending time with other Autistic people, and that it was often more comfortable and less pressured than spending time with non-Autistic people.  

This was a new way to study social interactions between Autistic and non-Autistic people, and the finding was quite surprising to some people (though, notably, not for a lot of Autistic people!). As such, we decided to do something called a ‘replication study’. This is when you repeat an experiment to see if you find the same result again. This is important because it checks whether your original findings are robust and reliable, and can help everyone feel more confident about the finding. It also tests whether the discovery works in a different situation or under different conditions.  

This time, we recruited a much larger sample study – over 300 participants (Crompton et al., 2025). We collected data in Scotland, England, and the USA. We used the same diffusion chain method, with a few tweaks. This time, participants were asked to share both a fictional story, and a passage of factual information. Additionally, some participants were told if they were interacting with an Autistic or non-Autistic person, and some weren’t told.   

“Finding that Autistic and non-Autistic groups share information just as well is a really important finding. ”

We found again, that Autistic groups and non-Autistic groups share information just as well as each other. This time, however, the mixed groups also performed just as well. We didn’t find a difference in performance when sharing fictional or factual information. And knowing whether their partner was Autistic or not didn’t change performance.  

Finding that Autistic and non-Autistic groups share information just as well is a really important finding. It indicates that Autistic people are just as able to accurately share information with others as non-autistic people are. This finding goes against a lot of Autism research which would indicate that Autistic people are poorer at interacting than non-Autistic people.  

Why do we think we found that mixed groups performed similarly to Autistic and non-Autistic groups in this study? This finding contrasts with our previous research. The newer study had a much larger sample than the original study. Participants were from three different geographical sites, and the whole participant group was very diverse on measures like gender, age, ethnicity, and age of diagnosis. Differences on these metrics may have influenced interaction and performance, overshadowing an effect of neurotype matching. Therefore, it seems that it is not just whether someone is Autistic or not that determines whether an interaction is successful, but potentially the match or mismatch of other important personal characteristics.  

This study has generated a huge amount of data that we’re looking forward to exploring over the coming months and years. In the future, we hope to be able to closely examine other parts of the interaction such as the specifics of what people are saying and how they are interacting with others, to understand more holistically the differences in how Autistic and non-Autistic people interact when they’re paired with someone of the same, or different, neurotype.  

References

Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704-1712. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286

Crompton, C. J., Hallett, S., Ropar, D., Flynn, E., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). ‘I never realised everybody felt as happy as I do when I am around autistic people’: A thematic analysis of autistic adults’ relationships with autistic and neurotypical friends and family. Autism, 24(6), 1438-1448. https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/218161055/1362361320908976.pdf

Crompton, C. J., Foster, S. J., Wilks, C. E., Dodd, M., Efthimiou, T. N., Ropar, D., ... & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2025). Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-13. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02163-z#citeas