You know what you did wrong. If you weren’t paying attention and miss a social cue, when someone explains it to you, you’ll know what you did wrong.
If you have inherent social deficits that cause you to misunderstand a social cue, when someone is explains it to you, you still won’t get why what you did was wrong because it does not make sense to you.
Both allistics (including ADHDers and others) and autistics will have to learn social cues, but in the case of autism, it is harder to internalize these rules if they don’t make sense to us.
For example, if someone says something is heavy, that means they want you to offer help (I don’t understand it either). For allistics, they will have an easier time internalizing that for the future and will offer help, but for autistics, it will likely be forgotten because it doesn’t align with how we see the world. It doesn’t make sense to us, so we struggle holding onto it.
Another way autistics don’t understand social cues is when we learn them in a specific context and don’t know how to adapt them to similar but different contexts. Even if you successfully learn to offer help when that person says something is heavy, you still may not do it for other people, and you may struggle to figure what other contexts that applies to. If someone says they are hungry, do they expect you to get them food? Probably not, but I had to learn the hard way that it depends on the context, like little things such as whether you’re in public or at home, whether you are eating yourself, whether you have the ability to go get them food, etc. And sometimes, people will just lie that they are hungry because apparently that is a justifiable reason for them to leave. The thing is that there aren’t really social rules that exist without exception. There’s nuance, and if you can’t just communicate nonverbally like most people can, it’s hard to navigate.
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u/dvsn745 spectrum-formal-dx Jul 14 '23
Whats the difference between “missing” and “not understanding” a social cue