In my experience (and I scored 28-29 AQ, depending on the day), there's a different kind of empathy that is very common on the spectrum. It is often very easy

In my experience (and I scored 28-29 AQ, depending on the day), there's a different kind of empathy that is very common on the spectrum. It is often very easy to do a deep kind of empathy, where you focus a lot of energy into running a full simulation of another person in your head. This is often much easier when the person you're simulating is similar to you (e.g., on the spectrum). It takes energy, and it's really hard to parallelize, that is, I can't easily deeply empathize with a dozen people at once. What a lot of normal people seem to be good at is a doing a first-order approximation of other people's intentions and motivations, a shallow type of empathy if you will. And perhaps it's just that if they're interacting with "normal" people, they can make a lot of assumptions that don't hold true for Aspies. That being said, there are a lot of good strategies I've learned on how to make chit-chat with normal people and "flow" conversation -- I explicitly had to learn it as I was not born with that package pre-installed.