All else being equal, how many other people would you like to interact with at any given time?  Would you rather be in a one-on-one conversation, in a small social group, or in front of a giant hall giving a lecture?

I’ve discussed this with a few autistic people, and most of us agree that the group situations are the worst.[1]

Not all neurotypicals seem to understand the difficulty of group interactions until it is explicitly pointed out to them, whereupon some may treat the idea as an unexpected insight.  It’s not something that has been properly researched and studied, even though it’s very relevant to autistic people’s ability to navigate social spaces in the real world.  Therefore, I thought I should write a post to explain how the number of participants in a social interaction can affect the difficulty of that interaction.

Basically, it comes down to social information-processing demands and turn-taking.  In a one-on-one interaction, you’re monitoring yourself and one other person.  You’re monitoring their facial expressions and body language, trying to understand their perspective, attempting to determine their intentions and anticipate their actions, monitoring turn-taking, modulating your own facial expressions and body language, and rapidly generating statements to fill gaps in the conversation – statements that must take into account all the other information you’re gathering.  There’s actually a huge number of things that go into even a “simple” one-on-one interaction.

But one-on-one is still relatively straightforward compared to social groups.  Each new person in the conversation means another person who must be monitored, another perspective to be decoded.  This rapidly increases the social-information processing demands.  It also makes turn-taking and contributing to the discussion much harder, because you not only need to generate statements, but you have to generate them in such a way that you have appropriate statements ready at appropriate times.  It’s hard to know when to take a turn in a group conversation, and it’s especially hard when you have to have a pertinent remark readily available when an opportunity for a turn comes along.  Everything is happening in mere seconds; even if you paused to think things over, the conversation would move on to something else and render your new plan useless before it could be enacted.

Thus, the more people enter an unstructured conversation, the harder the interaction becomes.

Eventually, we get to a point where even neurotypicals get overwhelmed, and the large group must either break up into smaller groups or adopt a formal structure, creating a clear system to formally determine who speaks at any particular time.

Once there’s a formal structure, things become easier again.  Public speaking is an example.  Many autistic and neurotypical people are very anxious about speaking in front of large crowds, but when one speaks in front of many people, nobody expects you to monitor the reactions of every audience member.  You just have to imagine how a generic audience member might react.[2]  Thus, anxiety aside, public speaking is actually relatively undemanding.

All of this emphasizes the importance of context in social interactions.  Different social contexts come with a bewildering variety of different expectations and rules, and as we’ve seen here, they also differ in the basic demands they impose on us.

 

Please go ahead and add your comments to this post!  Does what I am saying reflect your experience, or are there other factors to be considered here?

Footnotes

[1] At the very least, we tend to agree that group situations are worse than one-on-one interactions.  Because of anxiety, many of us (like many neurotypicals) don’t like the idea of public speaking.

[2] Lots of neurotypical people are surprisingly horrible public speakers.  For some reason, the automatic mechanisms that automatically give neurotypical people excellent vocal prosody seem to stop working when one gives a lecture to a faceless audience.  More experienced public speakers can inject prosody into their voices, but this apparently requires practice.