Social deficit? Or social defi…nitely-don’t-care?

Don’t get all worked up. This is just me thinking out loud.

I have problems with social settings. I really do. But I often find myself wondering if it’s less a deficit in social awareness, and more a different motivational structure (a different why, not a failed how). Let’s pull this apart.

The standard narrative is that autistic people struggle to social cues. But, hell, I do read them…especially the negative ones (derision, exclusion, mocking). What I don’t do is monitor them constantly as a way to regulate my behavior. Because I don’t think my behavior is rooted in alignment with other people…it’s rooted in functional or internal need.

When I was a kid I got bullied a lot. A psychologist might say that I failed to perceive signals from the group that would have allowed me to integrate successfully…and that bullying is a sort of result of failed integration. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not that I failed to perceive the signals that led up to being punched in the face…it’s more like those signals weren’t previously relevant to my goals. I had a different value hierarchy, maybe.

Your average neurotypical person is conditioned to constantly scan for social matching, conformity, “sameness” (gestures, interests, tones). They seek safety in blending in…self-protective group behavior built on the belief that sameness = acceptance.

I don’t do that…thing. Not by choice, anyway. I act based on what makes sense to me in the moment…functionally or internally. I’m constantly baffled by people’s need to ‘check in’ with each other. I really don’t know what that’s all about. It seems an awfully wasteful use of limited energy considering what else you could be doing. But I digress. People seem to think I act “differently” to stand out. BUT I HATE STANDING OUT. I act…based on needs. Not social mirroring. And I guess it only becomes “wrong” to me once someone points it out (over a lifetime, of course, I become able to anticipate what others think is wrong and sort of shape my behavior according to some invisible and shifting standards that I wish I’d never become aware of).

In any case, this confuses people. They think or say something like, “But you could tell we were uncomfortable!” Right, probably. But I didn’t prioritize your discomfort over my own need…or, it didn’t register with me as something needing immediate modification (until you named it, punished it, or laughed at it).

This is where the mythology of “mindblindness” fails…I’m not blind at all. Think of me as being non-compliant with unspoken conformity protocols…until I’m forcibly reminded. Then I mask, try to adjust, do my best to match your shifting standards and needs…but it’s reactive, not internalized. Please hear me when I say: I don’t mask because I want to be same (but don’t know how)…I mask because I’ve learned (the hard way) that you demand sameness.

Let’s say I’m right about this. Let’s say that, as an autistic person, I don’t actually have a problem reading social cues at all…I simply don’t allocate any time or energy to the task because, on some fundamental level, the cost/reward ratio doesn’t add up for me.

Then that would open the door to a radical reframing of how autism is interpreted within the predictive processing (PP) framework (which I’m a huge fan of).

In the dominant PP interpretation (e.g. Pellicano & Burr, Friston, Van de Cruys, Clark), autism is characterized by:

1. High precision prediction errors (Autistic brains assign more weight to sensory data (bottom-up input), and less weight to prior beliefs (top-down models)…which leads to a reduced ability to generalize, filter noise, or tolerate uncertainty.)
   
2. Low tolerance for ambiguity (Unexpected outcomes cause larger error signals in the autistic brain, leading to discomfort, rigidity, or repetitive behavior.)
   
3. Excessive demand for model updating (Because priors aren’t stick enough (i.e. I leave my model of the world more open to adjustment to real-time data), everything feels novel, and the brain is constantly working to remodel the world.)

From this lens, autism is seen as a kind of overactive reality-checking mechanism…hypersensitive to mismatch between prediction and perception.

But back to me. What if I can perceive social cues, but don’t automatically adjust behavior to match, and only respond when the consequences are made explicit? Well, then maybe it isn’t about being overwhelmed by error. Maybe it’s about being uninterested in minimizing certain kinds of social prediction errors (until they become functionally relevant).

In standard PP, error minimization is assumed to be globally prioritized (that’s my understanding of it). But what if I simply don’t care about being socially in sync unless it affects my access to something I need? So I don’t treat social mismatch as important prediction error?

That would mean some sort of hierarchy of predictive concern. Maybe my brain isn’t trying to minimize all errors…only the ones that interfere with internal coherence or functional outcomes. Maybe social expectations only matter once they constrain resources, safety, or autonomy. That would mean autistic perception may not be about error overload, but about prioritization mismatches (neurotypical brain treats social alignment as a high-priority prediction task but autistic brain treats functional clarity, pattern integrity, or sensory truth as higher priorities).

I’m almost definitely wrong…but if I’m right….if I’m right!!:

Autistic predictive systems don’t globally overweight prediction errors. They assign selective precision to biologically or perceptually grounded domains (e.g. sensory input, moral consistency, physical logic)…and lower precision to social expectations unless those expectations become explicit and consequential (like a punch to the head or being fired from a job). A different optimization strategy…more ecological/biological than performative. And “severity” would be the slider on that scale.