Abstract
Cognitive systems theory permits multiple stable regulatory organizations capable of minimizing uncertainty during social coordination. Yet, psychological classification depends on normative baselines against which variation in human behavior is interpreted, and these baselines often remain unexamined. This paper makes explicit the cognitive architecture underlying majority social cognition by synthesizing observations generated by autistic online communities with empirical literatures in social psychology, neuroscience, and sociology. The analysis situates autism within broader debates in critical psychology and philosophy of classification concerning how normative baselines become embedded within psychological description.
Drawing on predictive processing frameworks, the paper formalizes two regulatory architectures of social cognition: socially coupled cognition (SCC), which stabilizes interpretation through high precision-weighting of shared social priors and distributed affective alignment, and internally mediated cognition (IMC), which stabilizes interpretation through elevated precision-weighting of bottom-up sensory prediction errors and internally coherent models. We define an Architectural Ratio (ω = πp/πs) capturing this relative weighting, and formalize dyadic mismatch as Architectural Distance (Δω). Many behaviors currently classified as autistic deficits emerge as predictable consequences of interactional mismatch between these architectures within environments calibrated to socially coupled norms.
Extending Milton's (2012) double empathy framework, the paper argues that diagnostic categories function as perspective-dependent descriptions rather than neutral characterizations of intrinsic impairment. Ultimately, the model contributes a multi-architectural account of social coordination relevant not only to heterogeneous human populations but to the design of artificial multi-agent systems.
Keywords: cognitive architectures, social coordination, predictive processing, precision-weighting, double empathy problem, multi-agent systems, systemic mismatch
Plain Language Summary
The Core Conflict
For decades, psychology has treated one specific way of thinking as the "gold standard." If you don't think that way, you're labeled "disordered." This paper flips the script: "Normal" social thinking is just one cognitive style, not a universal truth. By treating a majority style as a default, we've pathologized people who simply use a different "operating system."
Key Insights
The Two Styles: The paper identifies Socially Coupled Cognition (the majority) and Internally Mediated Cognition (the autistic style).
The Double Empathy Problem: Data shows that while autistic and non-autistic people struggle to communicate with each other, autistic-to-autistic pairs communicate just as effectively as non-autistic pairs.
A New Definition: Diagnosis should be seen as "perspective-dependent." It's not a neutral description of a broken person; it's a description of how a majority observer perceives a minority mind.
The Recommendation
Stop trying to "fix" autistic cognition. Instead, recognize both architectures as valid regulatory strategies. We need environments — schools, offices, clinics — calibrated for both styles, not just the most common one.
Position in the Research Program
This paper establishes the foundational architectural distinction that all subsequent levels build upon. It identifies two distinct regulatory architectures of social cognition — socially coupled and internally mediated — and demonstrates how treating one as the unmarked default has shaped psychological classification. This architectural analysis feeds into Paper II (which formalizes the distinction computationally), Paper III (which examines the experiential consequences of architectural mismatch), Paper IV (whose mechanistic pathway operates within these architectures), and Paper V (which integrates both architectures into an ecological model). The Cultural/Representational level (Paper VI) spans this architectural distinction, showing how cultural forms encode, enforce, and naturalize one architecture as the normative standard.