How successfully do autistic and non-autistic raters guess the diagnostic status of people having conversations?
Authors: Sutherland Holly Elizabeth Anne , Axbey Harriet , Sharp Martha , Ropar Danielle , Fletcher-Watson Sue , Crompton Catherine J 
Published: August 2024

Recent research has shown that interactions between autistic people do not evidence the same social communication difficulties seen during interactions between autistic and non-autistic people. This raises questions about whether the social context (i.e. the respective autism status of the people interacting with one another) of an interaction affects observer’s ability to identify people as autistic. To examine whether the social context of an interaction also affects observers’ ability to identify autistic people in social interactions, we showed autistic and non-autistic raters videos (rater n=78; 39 autistic) and pictures (rater n=54; 27 autistic) of autistic and non-autistic people interacting (in own-neurotype and mixed pairs), and asked the raters to identify whether each member of the pair was autistic. Raters were able to identify autistic individuals in the stimuli at rates above chance. Dyad type, stimulus type (i.e. video or photo), and rater neurotype (as well as two- and three-way interactions between these factors) all affected identification accuracy, with raters displaying different patterns of accuracy across these factors. Our findings suggest that observers’ ability to identify autistic people depends on a number of socially contextual factors. There may also be an in-group guessing bias when attempting to identify someone’s diagnostic status.Lay summaryMost of what we know about autistic people’s behaviour is from a non-autistic perspective, and involving autistic people interacting with non-autistic people. Understanding how autistic people’s behaviour – and other people’s perceptions of autistic behaviour – changes depending on the social context (for example, whether someone is interacting with an autistic or non-autistic person) is important. We wanted to understand (1) whether being autistic affects how good you are at identifying autistic people, and (2) whether different social contexts makes it easier or harder to identify autistic people.We showed autistic and non-autistic people videos and photos of two people interacting. In these interactions, sometimes both people were autistic, sometimes both were non-autistic, and sometimes one person was autistic and one was non-autistic. We asked the people looking at these videos/photos to identify whether each person in the interaction was autistic.People were generally able to identify autistic people at rates better than chance, but some factors make identifying autistic people more difficult: when two autistic people are interacting, and when people only have a photograph to guess from. Autistic and non-autistic people also have different ‘patterns’ of which pairs of people they found easiest to guess correctly. These findings show that autistic people are better at identifying other autistic people than non-autistic people are – but that they can still often get it wrong. They also show that it’s harder to tell someone is autistic when they’re interacting with other autistic people, especially if the person trying to tell is non-autistic.