TL;DR: that's an outdated idea with an ever-growing body of research refuting it Autistic and neurotypical people can empathize with others like them, but have

TL;DR: that's an outdated idea with an ever-growing body of research refuting it Autistic and neurotypical people can empathize with others like them, but have trouble between the groups [1]. This is called the "double-empathy problem" by the paper which proposed the idea [2]. More recent papers explore subjects such as information transfer accuracy [3] with the same results: autistic participants understand each other perfectly well when allowed to use their preferred means of communication, as do neurotypicals. However, the two groups have trouble understanding each other. Further work extends this to a generalized model with extremely unsurprising results: people tend to be closer with people who think like them [4]. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-015-2662-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-015-2662-8 [2] https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62639/ https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62639/ [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286 [4] https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/16/1-2/222/5940490 https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/16/1-2/222/5940490