How successfully do autistic and non-autistic raters guess the diagnostic status of autistic and non-autistic people having conversations?

Recent research has shown that interactions between autistic people do not evidence the same social communication difficulties seen during interactions between autistic and non-autistic people. To examine whether the social context of an interaction also affects observers’ ability to identify autism in others, we showed autistic and non-autistic raters videos (rater n=78; 39 autistic) and pictures (rater n=54; 27 autistic) of autistic and non-autistic people interacting (in both own-neurotype and mixed pairs), and asked the raters to identify whether each member of the pair was autistic. Raters were able to identify autistic individuals in the stimuli at rates above chance, and pair type, stimulus type, and rater neurotype all affected identification accuracy. Notably, raters were least accurate at identifying autistic individuals within autistic pairs, often assuming both individuals were non-autistic (therefore performing below chance). This suggests that observers’ ability to identify autistic people does depend on social context.