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Damian Milton

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Who they are

Damian Milton is an autistic autism researcher — a combination that matters because it positions him to challenge the field from inside it. He is a lecturer in Intellectual and Developmental Disability at the Tizard Centre, University of Kent, and chair of the Participatory Autism Research Collective (PARC). He is best known for the Double Empathy Problem (2012), a concept that has reshaped how researchers, practitioners, and autistic people themselves understand autistic social experience.

Key contributions

The Double Empathy Problem (2012)

Milton’s most significant contribution is a single, powerful reframing. The conventional clinical view — rooted in Simon Baron-Cohen’s Theory of Mind work — held that autistic people have a deficit in understanding other people’s mental states. Milton argued that the difficulty is bidirectional: autistic people struggle to read non-autistic people, and non-autistic people struggle to read autistic people. The problem is not that one side lacks empathy; it is that empathy breaks down across a gap in neurotype, in both directions.

This is not just a theoretical nicety. It changes what you try to fix. If the problem is one-sided (autistic deficit), the solution is social skills training aimed at autistic people. If the problem is bidirectional (mutual misunderstanding), the solution involves changing non-autistic people’s behaviour and environments as much as changing autistic people’s.

The empirical evidence has increasingly supported Milton’s framing. Studies show that autistic people communicate effectively with other autistic people, and that non-autistic people are poor at reading autistic affect and intent. A 2025 systematic review of 52 papers found that autistic-autistic interactions were generally associated with better quality of life and more positive interpersonal experiences.

Participatory research

As chair of PARC, Milton has been a persistent advocate for autistic people being co-researchers rather than research subjects. This is methodological, not just political: he argues that research about autistic people conducted entirely by non-autistic people will systematically misunderstand its subject. The participatory approach directly parallels the SGL project’s Adapted Intervention Mapping methodology.

”Ten years on” — the 2022 reflection

Milton, Gurbuz & López (2022) published a ten-year retrospective on the Double Empathy Problem in Autism, reviewing how the concept had been received, tested, and (sometimes) misunderstood. The paper is a model of honest self-assessment by a researcher reviewing their own foundational claim.

Critical assessment

The Double Empathy Problem is widely accepted within the autistic community and increasingly within research, but it has limitations:

  • It does not fully account for autism + ID. The bidirectional-mismatch framing assumes both parties have broadly comparable communicative capacity. For autistic people with significant intellectual disability, the picture is more complicated. The mismatch is real, but so are genuine communicative limitations that cannot be resolved simply by meeting in the middle.
  • Risk of minimising real difficulty. An overly enthusiastic reading of “the problem is bidirectional” can slide into implying that autistic social difficulties would vanish if non-autistic people just tried harder. Milton himself does not make this claim, but the concept is sometimes deployed in ways that understate genuine distress.
  • The term “empathy” remains slippery. The Double Empathy Problem inherits the ambiguity of the word “empathy” — cognitive empathy, affective empathy, sympathy, and compassion are different things, and the bidirectional breakdown may not operate equally across all of them.

Selected works

  • Milton, D.E.M. (2012). “On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem.‘” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. — The foundational paper.
  • Milton, D., Gurbuz, E., & López, B. (2022). “The ‘double empathy problem’: Ten years on.” Autism, 26(8), 1901–1903. — The retrospective.
  • Milton, D.E.M. (2014). “Autistic expertise: A critical reflection on the production of knowledge in autism studies.” Autism, 18(7), 794–802. — The methodological argument for participatory research.

Last reviewed

2026-04-12.

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