Persons with autism have some great social skills.

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I never thought about whether I find him charismatic or not. But I've noticed that there's two very different things people tend to mean by charisma:

1. A particular set of excellent social skills that allows someone to charm people at will. This is what it tends to mean when people describe some sociopaths as charismatic. (Though by far most people charismatic in this sense are not at all sociopaths, that's just an example.) This can be a consciously manipulative thing but it can also be there in people who are nice and honest and never manipulative. But definitely a set of social skills anyway. This can take many different forms and be due to a lot of different skills.

2. An attribute that seems to come more from somewhere within a person. It draws people to them and makes people more likely to listen to them. Except it has nothing to do with social skills, manipulation, slickness, nor does it relate at all to those people that everyone looks at and listens to whose every movement is perfectly placed (hard to describe but definitely not what I mean). It's just something within the person. It can have far more to do at times with a sincerity and honest desire to do the right thing or look for the truth. I'm probably describing it all wrong but this has nothing to do with social skills and is pretty much never present in the bad version of the first kind of charisma (though people with the bad version of the first kind do their best to emulate it, and even though people with the second kind are far from infallible and can misuse their charisma without intending to).

Anyway the first kind whether good or bad is a social skill. The second kind is more like an innate trait that has to do with things other than social skills. But sometimes the point of the bad manipulative version of the first kind is to imitate the second. But they're miles apart.

I'm not saying Alex has or doesnt have either one. Just making the point (less for you than for people in general and possibly the OP) that charisma is not always a social skill even when correctly identified.

Yep. This works in different ways for myself.

In a novel setting this is a discharge of energy. I find the 'whole conglomerate,' i.e. new place, new names, sights and sounds, and the inherent social dynamics taxing to the CNS. The new information is a"load." Forget about remembering names and even most of what was said, as it quickly fades.

One on one, as in a quieter place, I can find it edifying. I've sat at a table recently with like minded folk, at Olive Garden (restuarant), and it was edifing . There were 10.

The problem with that experiment is that it wouldn't be... detailed? enough.

What I mean is... okay. So I have some amazing interactions with other autistic people. Amazingly easy. Amazingly effortless at least as compared my interactions with most nonautistic people. Just amazing.

Problem is, I don't have these interactions with all autistic people.

I have them with the autistic people who are most compatible with me. This includes both people who share a lot of things in common with me. And people who don't necessarily have those things in common but find it easier to communicate with people who do. The less like either of these things, the less easy the communication is.

At the extreme other end... there are autistic people including some on this site that I consciously avoid communicating with because our communication styles are so incompatible that it always ends up with them angry and me screaming or crying in meltdown from trying so so hard to communicate and be understood only to be treated like I mean something I never said (I rarely admit the meltdowns though because the people I mean would likely use those things against me -- but one of my hot buttons is to put all I have into communicating accurately and honestly only to be treated like a liar or to have the other person insist I meant something totally different, fortunately these people are few and far between but our encounters are memorably devastating for me).

To make matters more complicated, not all people who are easy to communicate with and share those things in common with me are autistic. A lot of the nonautistic ones have intellectual disabilities. Some have severe epilepsy affecting their ability to process information. And many have either severe receptive language impairments. Or severe impairments in the ability to use language for communication (whether or not on the surface they "seem okay", much like I sometimes did at times when unable to use words communicatively) that have required them to find other ways to communicate. And also not everyone who communicates well with me is even the same species. (Including the grey furry person nestled against my cheek right now.)

At the very best, communication with a person who just absolutely matches up with me in many respects... it's like pure, languageless resonance. Perceiving the same things and experiencing those shared perceptions without the need to point or anything. Reading what the other perceives through their bodily physical reactions to their perceptions. Please nobody read anything psychic into this, it's just a product of extreme compatibility. When that compatible even language used to communicate over the Internet is absolutely full of resonance far beyond the meaning of the words.

And I've already described the worst. I'd prefer not to dwell on that.

An experiment that simply matched autistic person with autistic person (remember not all autistic people here are AS) wouldn't be enough to single out the truly extraordinary communication that can happen between autistic people who are highly similar or otherwise compatible. And traditional subgroups (autism, AS, PDDNOS, CDD, HFA, MFA, LFA, Kanner's, etc.) just don't cut it -- highly similar people may be in totally different categories officially and people within each official category can be more different than some people in different categories are. So it would be hard to group the best matches together well enough to show the true potential of autistic people's communication with compatible people. (Plus for some autistic people those similar to them may be less compatible. And that's beside the issue of pairing autistic people with people we just met and expecting good communication. And some autistic people find all autistic people just as hard to communicate with as nonautistic people.)

So... really hard to do that experiment well, despite that it could show some really important things if done right.

I guess the main point in these ideas is that the experimental results would vary a lot because of factors other than autism. But the question it would seek to answer would be, "can any significant difference be seen between the success of social/working interaction of NT, AS and mixed groups? The variance within the groups might well prove so large that no significant difference was apparent - but provided the study looked at large numbers of interactions, that would tell us that there's probably no truth in the idea that AS+AS is more successful (or less) than NT-NT, and if the mean results showed a difference (albeit not statistically significant), then that would show that even if a real difference exists, other factors have at least a comparable effect. That would be worth knowing. Of course the exact experimental design would need to be properly thought out.

I can be very social on the computer but if you met me in real life Id be very closed off and afraid to speak. I typically hide behind my husband and I have difficulty grasping communication in a group of people. I tend to listen to a conversation that is far away from me and not the person talking to me.
I also think that because of my life experiences I have gained a lot of empathy and I enjoy helping people (online). I have the ability to step back and come up with ideas that other people dont seem too. Recently I came up with an idea for my son to participate in a conservation youth video with the kids of our community for the Save Japan Dolphins. I wont go into all the details but the girl who is asking for the videos to show at universities in Japan to make more young people aware is so excited by my ideas that she wants to post them on her blog to spur on others to do the same. In this way someone might think that I am a charismatic people person to organize a bunch of kids to make a video but in reality Im just the idea person and my husband is doing all the communication with the kids and parents.

Frankly, this sounds a great deal akin to many of my attempts to interact with people. There have been times when I tried to socially connect with people, both neurotypical and with Asperger's, only to find that my efforts to be candid and frank, accurate, are met with disdain and suspicion (people twisting my words to have meanings they didn't have, acting as if I'm a liar; I even had someone accuse me of acting omniscient, then debase me because of how I am, merely for trying to help the community they were part of).

I can usually manage in social situations with neurotypical people so long as they aren't real-time or those kinds of people. It's exhausting sometimes because I usually have to explain my words in great detail so that there is no confusion or so that no one misconstrues my meaning. This is perhaps why I find online communication easier. In real-time, especially with those kinds of people that like to pick you apart for no reason, I get very flustered and typically end up having a meltdown (which is problematic because I live with a sibling that uses people to get what he wants and perpetually derides everyone around him; it's his natural state, apparently).

I have developed and adapted a few social strategies for the internet, which help me get by, with the exception of the meeting of certain people.

I like alex planks videos. since i dont know him personally, i cant really make a judgement call on his functionability. however most people with asperger arent high functioning, or gifted. thats rare

I can't even play with young kids so does that make my social skills worse?

I remember when a 12 and I think 9 year old visited my house because my mum was friends with their dad and me being her youngest she thought they could hang out with me. I really didn't know what to do. I wanted to talk to them about physics and Astronomy. My sister communicated with them better.
Even with my own nieces I can't play with them normally. The best I do is share my interests with them. My one year old niece liked my Dalek figures so there's something we have in common. Actually she is very much like me so I'm thinking she has some ASD traits if not more to be diagnosed.
But I rather educate than play with them. And that's pretty much how I handle adult conversations too. I want to educate and be educated when I talk to people.

My main point was that it could be thrown off by factors that were autism.

Those differences I was describing were mostly not personality differences. They were differences in how autism is expressed in each person. (Or rather what traits each person had that resulted in being labeled autistic.) I communicate far better with people of my particular subtype of autism than with most other autistic or nonautistic people. But we are a noticeably smaller fraction of the autistic population than most are, so that extreme ease of communication wouldn't show up between me and most other autistic people.

Which just reminded me of a second problem: The better I communicate with someone, the less like communication it looks to most people. With the best kind of communication, I can be on one side of the room doing one thing and they can be on the other side doing another. And it doesn't look to most people like communication at all. (Much as I once had an exchange with another autistic woman where she indicated she'd noticed her by circling around a table I was sitting at without looking at me and I indicated I noticed her simply with the way the frequency of my rocking altered on its own when I noticed her. We both got the point. Nobody else did.)

I felt the same way growign up.

You have some pretty significant sensory issues, right? I think this might make it hard for you to be around children, regardless of your social abilities. I wouldn't say it makes your social skills worse.

OK, I was a bit short of time when I posted that. I agree that the spectrum nature of AS also makes it more difficult to get clear-cut data.......we used to get a similar problem when studying metabolites and enzymes in cancer patients - for most of the parameters we looked at, the normals had a well-defined range, but results from the cancer group were all over the place. Not surprising considering that cancer is a random mutation in an otherwise (fairly) predictable organ. The clinicians who led the work were used to seeing data from other disorders in which certain parameters were clearly raised or lowered in almost every case, which makes for a very easy statistical analysis. Luckily AS isn't quite as random as cancer. We're not looking for a diagnostic marker - that really would be chasing rainbows.

I am very encouraged by your comment. I am a person who struggles very much in the social area. I have interests in things like engineering, physics, astronomy, world history, and martial arts, yet I have trouble finding common ground with ordinary people. I guess it is because the world I live in is different from that of others. People who know me are aware of how quiet I am and of how I won't get bored after spending hours on end by myself, and it literally drives them insane. I personally have trouble figuring out how people can talk all day on the phone or spend hours making small talk about absolutely nothing, and not be exhausted from it all.

I think that the only thing Aspergers is that it is just a different way of seeing the world. It sets us apart, and it is what makes us unique. You have helped me realize that I am not socially incompetent; I just relate to others and the world around me differently than most other people. I am the non-conformist type, and I usually don't cave in to peer pressure, because quite frankly, I just don't care. Even though I may have a lot of bizarre interests, I can still be free to be my own person, and most people will find that to be a breath of fresh air.

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"You are never completely worthless; you can always go down as a really bad example."

Setting setting setting. It's to us like location is to a Realtor. It's everything and a good one commands a premium price - if you don't believe that check the rates of a good therapist who has experience with AS in adults, assuming you can find one. I can (I'm told, I trust NTs to know better than I do) be charming, engaging, intelligent, thoughtful and flexible if I'm doing public speaking on something I know. I can take up either the alpha female or male role if no one else seems interested in stepping up and doing that online in a familiar environment and do very well at either.

Both of those are somewhat structured situations where my exposure is limited though. A public speaking role doesn't require me to do it over and over again for 4+ hours every day. Online I don't have to remember to constantly make eye contact and limit the amount of fake smiling just enough that it's not creepy but not enough that everyone thinks I'm pissed off. In both of those situations I'm also allowed to be a bit AS which helps soo much. It won't be held against me since in one case it's why I'm there (public speaking), and in the other it's just dismissed as me being a 'solid bro' (online gamers, they dismiss a lot of AS attributes as being a somewhat self-sufficient loner dude). So it's dissimilar to extended long term social interaction that can be very exhausting if I am constantly expected to wear a mask of normality that doesn't really reflect my actual personality.

I think we spend a lot of time thinking about things. Because we have to. We're trying to make sense of a world that seems to take a perverse delight in being contrary merely for the sake of it, chaotic and downright pointlessly sadistic at times. So we spend a lot of time mentally taking the pieces apart and trying to reason out why things work the way they work. Or as I commonly heard asked in angry frustrated voices in programming classes "But WHY does it work now? It shouldn't! This makes no sense!".

Experience has also taught us that given a chance we will be misunderstood, so we need to choose our words as carefully as we can and try to be as precise as is possible. This constant misunderstanding colors our world view so strongly I think and I suspect that is why you see us as insightful. Because most people who are accepted without question never have cause to really examine themselves or the world they live in. Why should they? We on the other hand are forced to search for answers, reasons, for anything that can shed some light on the why and wherefores because that is the only way we can start to try to understand what holds us back. Until we do how can we ever hope to counteract it?

I think small children might be easy for people without the sensory issues and trust issues to deal with (i.e. not me) since they don't have as fixed ideas on what is and is not accepted as the right social behavior. So their directness and acceptance can be refreshing. If you say something odd they often don't even notice, or they just accept it, say "you're silly" and giggle, or they randomly decide to grab their Spongebob plushie and start spinning around in the middle of the room singing a silly song to themselves. You never know. But they're rarely as intentionally hurtful to strange adults as strange adults tend to be to one another. Which could be a very nice change of pace.

Perhaps. But I can tell when they cause me distress. I don't feel it always. People usually like to pretend play with kids or baby talk to them. With me the only thing I could really do was show them how to play games on my phone. Another thing other people do is force out praise to children. I don't know if they are really forcing it out but it looks that way to me. Even when I was young and showing my mother a drawing and she would say 'wow, that's marvelous' I could tell it was forced out. I suppose I'm better at reading tone of voice than I thought I was.

I think I'd be good with kids interested in science or if they loved Doctor Who or Stargate. My youngest niece likes Dalek's so it's only a matter of time before we can share that love with each other. I need something specific to talk to people about, even as kids. I could probably simplify my words so they can understand, possibly. I suppose I could teach them how to draw. I really just want to be a teacher to them. Strange thing is I have never once considered pursuing a career as a teacher.

I don't really socialise differently. I just feel I shy away a lot of times, and so lack some of the social cues I could do with. Mostly I feel the same as what a shy NT would feel. I know all the right social cues, but it's letting them out into the open what makes me anxious and more shy. Because I don't stim or go on about my special interests, people just consider me as a shy person, not as an odd person. I hope that doesn't sound like a stereotype there - I'm just telling this from a NT point of view. Most NTs think you're odd or something if you flap your hands a lot or talk excessively about a unique topic what most people don't think of in their daily lives, eg like star trek or something like that, as what some Aspies seem to be into. Not me however - I'm into the weather, buses, and men, which aren't really a unique discussion to bring up to people because most people use those sorts of topics in general conversation. They often talk about the weather, or buses (if they catch them a lot, which I do), and most women talk about men. So I get off pretty lucky there.