Friends says I lack thoughtfulness. Is that an aspie trait?

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My childhood friend says he noticed it even when I was young. My other friend also says the same thing.

Things is, I feel like I care for people. Is this common is aspie or am I just really self centred?

The thing about aspergers is that there's a fundamental understanding about the I/thou relationship that is delivered automatically to NTs when they first start looking around.

Aspies go through that stage without noticing the others. Roughly...

As a consequence, our world views are based - IMHO - on a world with one person in it. To people whose worlds are normally populated, that looks egocentric. We seem, to them, to be willfully ignoring people other than us. To us, it's an unresolveable puzzle.

Sorry, I know that doesn't help. It's just the way it is.

Its not that we are not thoughtful, rather we lack it is more or less we lack good theory of mind, and lack clinical empathy (the ability to see anothers perspective).

In fact its only the first definition of thoughtful we don't meet. The other ones, manifesting carful thought, and occupied with or given to a thought, and careful, heedful, mindful, we all pretty much meet, often moreso than NT. Thoughts are what we work in. We are thoughtful, just not in a way that is empathetic. We are wrapped up in our own thoughts, introspective.

It's a by-product of our social obliviousness--we don't see when there are reasons or opportunities to perform acts that would demonstrate outwardly the caring we feel inwardly.

It entirely depends on the expectations of your friends. There is common expectation out there, for instance, for you to remember a friend's birthday and get him/her a card and/or "thoughtful" gift. If you are really bad at doing this (like me, for instance), that can be considered to be very unthoughtful.

Other friends may know that you do this and overlook it, but that takes a bit of "good" interaction up front... enough to get them to like you and overlook the things that are different about you.

You say that you 'feel like you care' for people; I think that's enough to establish that you do care for people. I can't add anything to what the others have already said about the technical side of how this apparent self-centeredness factors into autism (is one of its main characteristics, in fact, hence the word 'autism').

My friends have all experienced this with me. I remember in secondary school (I was 14-15), when one of my friends asked me if he could have a sweet, and I gave him a yellow one - which was not my favourite flavour. He asked me, 'Don't you like those?' And I said 'No'. And he said 'Thanks', a bit hurt. After that, I immediately realised I had done something wrong, something very inconsiderate. That little episode is a motivation for me to try harder at learning those silly social customs.