I often write here about my experiences as an autistic MLIS student and library patron and researcher. That’s pretty much the point of this blog. I write about it because it’s important to me that libraries be an inclusive and accessible space for people with different types of neurology (and other types of diversity), both for patrons and staff. In fact, all communities are mixed-neurotype communities. The neurotypical behavior is often discussed and even codified as the standard that librarians should aim to achieve and the best way to interact with library patrons. An autistic librarian would struggle to meet many of these standards, as I discussed related to emotional intelligence and the RUSA behavioral guidelines.
The theory behind these guidelines and standards is that there is a “best” way to behave or provide service. We must greet every patron with a smile, and monitor our body language to express attention and interest. These kinds of behaviors are what society expects from service positions like reference librarians. Neurotypical librarians will aim to provide them, and indeed have written them down as guidelines for other librarians to follow. Neurotypical patrons will expect these behaviors from librarians when seeking assistance at the reference desk. Autistic librarians who may have difficulty producing these behaviors may be reviewed poorly in their employee performance evaluations, struggle to be hired due to these considerations during interviews, and struggle with acquiring the prerequisite education (which I experience and write about frequently). Such deficient librarians would provide substandard service, create friction with coworkers, and so on. So the theory goes.
And if an autistic librarian, with all their deficiencies in social communication, were to try to provide service to an autistic patron with all their deficiencies in social communication, we would expect the resulting interaction to be doubly ineffective. Identifying autistic and otherwise neurodivergent paradigms of communication as deficiencies in referred to as “pathologizing” (pathology being the study of disease), and it related to the medical model of disability where people who are different from typical are considered broken and in need of medical intervention to correct them back to being typical. The contrast to this idea, developed by autistic research Damian Milton in 2012, is the Double Empathy Problem. He posited that autistics and their communication paradigm wasn’t a deficiency, but merely a difference, and that communication between autistics would not suffer degradation because there would be no difference in paradigm like there would be between an autistic and a neurotypical person. Rather than being double ineffective, they would have no impairment in communication.
This has always matched my personal experience of communication, but I’ve still received a lot of pushback when I try to advocate for this point of view. I was delighted to see that research continues to build support for the double empathy theory, including a 2020 study by Crompton et al. In the study, they recruited equal numbers of autistics and non-autistics and divided them into three groups. One group was made up solely of non-autistics, one solely of autistics, and one with a mix of both. Each group had its participants ordered, and the order of the mixed group was to interleave autistics and non-autistics. The researchers gave the first member of each group a set of information, and they would relate it to the next member of the group, and so on down the line. The researchers evaluated each interaction to observe information degradation at each subsequent retelling, and analyzed the results. If the pathologizing theory were correct, the group of solely autistic people should have performed much worse than the solely non-autistic group, with the mixed group being in the middle. Instead, the researchers found that the autistic group had a comparable rate of degradation to the non-autistic group, and the mixed group experienced significantly worse degradation. This is strong support for the double empathy perspective.
When would these kinds of scenarios show up in librarianship? When a manager is explaining to their employees about a new program that’s being started. When one is working on a new LibGuide. When explaining the collection development policy to an anti-LGBTQIA2S+ book banning bigot trying to get Gender Queer off the shelves. Or when helping a student find information for an assignment at the reference desk. Transferring information from one person to another is a core function of librarianship. The kinds of interactions that the research above examined happen every day in every library.
The implications are clear. If libraries hope to achieve good service to all patrons and support diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, we can’t pick one communication modality as “best.” If we do, we will see information degradation in interactions with neurodivergent patrons and staff. And if we require autistic librarians to interact with autistic patrons as if both were neurotypical, then we will see doubly impaired communication.
Instead, we need to adopt an approach to these interactions that supports the diversity of communication styles across neurotypes. We need to remove these guidelines and best practices that center the neurotypical experience at the expense of others. We should improve education around different communication needs and neurodiversity, both in MLIS programs and continuing education. We should explore ways to pair patrons with librarians who have similar communication styles. Lead by neurodivergent people, we should create new guidelines and best practices that serve the needs of all. And we should aim to interact with each person, whether librarian or patron, in a way that meets their needs as a whole person instead of treating everyone like they’re neurotypical. What we’re after, after all, isn’t equality. It’s equity.
Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008