social rituals

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It seems to be a "common truth" that autists/aspies have rituals and NT people don't.
Have you never felt that "the proper way of social interactions" - all this stuff about "proper" eye contact, "proper" facial mimics, "proper" body language, "proper" voice, "proper" choice of words IS a ritual with very rigid rules?

Trust me: NT's have rituals, too.

The only reason anything we do is considered "weird" or "disordered" is because there are fewer of us than there are of them.

I guess my ritual is to prepare for the worst but to hope for barely adequate.

Those are like rituals but they are group rituals that they have been attuned to since birth.
Autistic rituals are very personal things. They're rituals for an inward focused mind.

I think you are right. It's just consensus.

Yes, this hits the nail on the head.

Neurotypical rituals are those that are learned unconsciously from the surrounding culture. Autistics invent their own rituals in accordance with their personal needs and tend to ignore rituals performed by others. We have to be told repeatedly to shake hands, say "How are you?" etc. and still don't internalise these rituals to the point where they become subconscious.

This sums it up well.

As an NT I think we do have rituals but the reason they can, perhaps, be difficult to learn when they don't come naturally is that they don't have rigid rules at all. They are innate and context specific so what would be a social blunder in one situation is perfectly acceptable in another.
We don't hold eye contact for x number of seconds then look away. If the rule was that rigid then few people would find it a problem. We look when it feels natural and we look away when it feels right to do so. How long eye contact is held will depend on who you are talking to and how well you know them, what you are talking about etc.

I am curious, and would appreciate some NT insight into the following:

1. How much, if at all, do you consciously think about social rituals (a) before you execute them and (b) after you execute them?
2. How often do you feel you made a mistake in a social ritual, and how does the mistake get to your attention?

1. Before I execute them I would say I never think about it. After I will occasionally think about it if I've f****d up but more in a slightly amused way then letting it get to me.
2. I think I make mistakes fairly often but I realise myself after the event. Like for eg quite often if I'm distracted at the school another parent will ask me how my weekend was and I will tell them about it at great length then end the conversation and leave without asking them the same. Usually on my way home I will realise and think it was sort of rude and tell myself I must make an effort to seem interested inthem next time! Or if I'm going somewhere and someone says 'have a nice time at x' I sometimes say 'you too' even though they're not going there because I wasn't listening to them. So nt's make social mistakes quite often I think - but they don't care.

Those are just different types of mistakes.

Maybe but I see a lot of posts on here about when people feel they've really embarrassed themselves and it is generally something that most people do a lot of the time without much thought. I always wonder is it because people with asd try a lot harder they get more upset at making errors or whether it is that nt errors are brushed aside more easily by others or just play on nt's mind less? Or all of the above? I also see a lot of posts where people feel they have made an error when they actually haven't but people around them being mean make them feel as though they have.

I'd say the second one. I often see people talking pure BS, but everyone listens to them in open-mouthed excitement because of the way they talk. And the opposite, when people are talking very reasonably things and nobody listens to them. From my perspective, "what" you are talking has 5% of importance for people and "how" you are talking - the rest 95%.

Thanks. This confirms my understanding of what people mean by intuitively doing "the right thing", i.e. not consciously thinking about it in advance. I find it hard to imagine intuitive social interaction. In a social context I actively need to switch on my social "radar" to scan for cues in the environment that I may need to respond to, such as saying "Hi" at the right moment. Like any conscious process the social radar consumes mental energy.

I have trained myself not to let any mistakes get to me.

Yesterday I ran a business meeting, and had invited people that I had never met before. Before I could even start the meeting, one attendee made it very clear that she felt we should not be having the meeting, using an aggressive tone of voice, and claiming that there had been no prior communication to explain what the meeting was about. This of course was not true, the opposite was the case. I had sent out a detailed introductory email 5 days earlier, explaining the context and the purpose, and offering to answer any questions regarding the context in advance. I received no feedback, only to have this person turn up and complain loudly at the start of the meeting. Her colleagues then happily joined in, commenting about all the other important tasks that they have to attend to.

In this kind of situation, I don't have any intuitive reaction. I am puzzled, and tend to let people ramble for half a minute to two minutes before I manage to get a word in. Luckily I don't have any issues with self-esteem, but the time that I take to quietly think through what may have happened is probably interpreted as a "weakness", and when I then provide an explanation in calm words it is probably interpreted as "arrogance".

My "mistake" in this example was my inability to respond intuitively, within a fraction of a second of a social attack. That's something that I will never be able to do. I will always first think things through, and then respond. Only much later, when I thought about the event again did it dawn on me that the person in question probably felt that in the whole approach leading up to the meeting I should have given her more personal attention, rather than inviting her alongside a number of others. I suspect she had a need to communicate her social status quite forcefully before engaging in any interaction.

I often find that problems arise because my focus in communication is always on (a) reaching a shared understanding on some topic, or (b) solving a concrete problem, or (c) completing a particular piece of work, whereas others may primarily be concerned about protecting or elevating their social status.


Yes, that's what I suspected. In contrast, I must care to a certain extent, because I don't interact intuitively, and need good heuristics to operate my social radar. It is a balancing act of how much time to spend on fine tuning the social radar vs. just going with the heuristics that I've been using to date. The older I get, the less I feel the need to continue to fine tune the social radar. I have more important and more enjoyable things to think about.

I treat events like the example above as the unavoidable cost of living on the wrong planet. What is sad though is the level of aggressiveness that is often displayed in social interaction. I am not convinced that neurotypical people are better at collaborating than aspies. It is simply much harder or impossible to get a group of aspies to organise and collaborate in a hierarchy, but that does not mean that there are no other viable forms of collaboration.