Autistic Symptoms With Good "Social Intelligence"

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On the whole I like this list too. There are a few things on it, though, that I question. For example:

"Imitates friends or peers in style, dress, attitude, interests, and manner (sometimes speech)"

Doesn't almost everyone do this (including NT's, perhaps even more so than autistic people), except for a handful of nonconformists? Isn't the crucial difference here that autistic people have to put more effort into such imitation to be able to pull it off?

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 30 Mar 2021, 2:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What are your social skills like when you are not in leadership positions, especially when you are a newcomer to a group?

I personally am better at leading groups than I am at participating in groups led by others. Learning to be a leader was actually an accommodation strategy for me. I'm still lousy at unfocused party chitchat, especially in group situations where I'm not the natural center of attention.

When I lead a group, I try to structure things in such a way as to maximize the ability of people with my specific group-participation difficulties to participate.

I consider my difficulties with unfocused party chitchat to be an unalterable fact of my nature, arising from my difficulties with attention-shifting (common among autistic people).

I consider my social skills to be very uneven. There are some specific social skills I've learned to be very good at, as a way of compensating for other social skills that I am extraordinarily bad at and consider to be beyond my reach. (This is why I so often talk about "autistic-friendly social skills.")