EDITORIAL | What If Social Competence Isn’t the Same as Social Intuition?

A quick note: This is a little different from my usual research-based posts. Consider this an editorial—a mix of personal reflection, professional observation, and questions I’ve been thinking about regarding autism and the DSM-5-TR.

This is a side note to my relational bandwidth series…

Imagine getting a warm message from an old friend you haven’t talked to in quite a while.

The affection is obvious. They clearly care about you.

But what does that mean about the relationship?

Are we still friends? Former friends who still care about each other? Is this an invitation to reconnect? Do I initiate more contact? Wait for them?

Maybe this is a form of relationship math—trying to take social information and calculate what it means about the relationship and how much reciprocal engagement is expected.

And I’ve started noticing how much I’ve done this throughout my own life.

Looking back, I could be remarkably clueless about whether someone was simply being friendly or actually interested in me romantically unless the signals became pretty obvious.

Even my husband basically had to have a Define The Relationship conversation with me before I understood where we stood.

Apparently I need a DTR for everybody. 😂

Friend? Close friend? Acquaintance? Colleague? Romantic interest? Just friendly?

Sometimes I think fourth graders had the better system:

Do you want to be my friend?

Circle YES or NO.

Perfect. Thank you. I now have the information necessary to proceed. 😂

Of course, I’ve learned enough social rules to know that adults generally don’t ask each other, “So…are we friends?”

Which creates an interesting problem:

I know I’m probably not supposed to ask the question. That doesn’t necessarily mean I know the answer.

And that has me thinking differently about DSM-5-TR Criterion A1: deficits in social-emotional reciprocity.

Because today, I’m socially competent. I’m an LPCC who has spent more than 25 years working in mental health. I’ve had decades of explicit training and practice in listening, reflecting, reading emotional and nonverbal cues, asking questions, tolerating silence, and calibrating reciprocal interaction.

But how much of social competence is intuitive—and how much can be learned?

Maybe some people spend decades observing social patterns, developing rules, learning from mistakes, and building increasingly sophisticated models for navigating relationships.

Being good at the calculation isn’t necessarily the same thing as never having needed to calculate it.

That distinction matters when we assess adults for autism.

It also gets into one of my ongoing frustrations with the transition from DSM-IV Asperger’s Disorder to Autism Spectrum Disorder in DSM-5, a structure retained in the current DSM-5-TR.

Under the older Asperger’s framework, impaired social-emotional reciprocity was one possible manifestation within the social domain. It was not independently mandatory. Under the current ASD framework, all three social-communication domains—A1, A2, and A3—must be present.

I understand why autism was consolidated into a spectrum.

But I wonder whether some nuance was lost.

I’ve had Facebook followers tell me they fit—or were actually diagnosed under—the older Asperger’s framework, only to later be told during reassessment that they did not meet current ASD criteria.

Those experiences are anecdotal, not research data, and I can’t speak to the accuracy of anyone’s individual assessment.

But they raise an interesting question:

What happens when the characteristic we’re trying to assess is also something a person has spent decades learning to compensate for?

The DSM-5-TR recognizes that symptoms may be masked by learned strategies later in life. But recognizing compensation in principle and detecting it clinically are two different things.

An adult may make appropriate eye contact, ask reciprocal questions, express empathy, recognize emotion, maintain conversations, understand social conventions, and have relationships.

Perhaps we also need to ask:

How did they get there?

Did that social understanding develop relatively intuitively?

Or did they spend decades observing, pattern-matching, consciously learning social rules, and refining their responses until the finished product became socially competent?

That makes me wonder whether we need more nuance around social capacity, social performance, and social automaticity.

They aren’t necessarily the same thing.

And maybe that’s something a future DSM-6 will capture better, particularly for highly compensated adults.

Because an evaluator meeting someone at 40, 50, or 60 is seeing the finished product.

The finished social model doesn’t necessarily tell us how the model was built.

And apparently, underneath my 54 years of accumulated social knowledge and more than 25 years working in mental health, there is still occasionally a fourth grader holding a note:

Do you want to be my friend?

Circle YES or NO. 😂

Please circle one.

Because I know I’m probably not supposed to ask—but I genuinely may not know otherwise.

Darcy Stephens, LPCC