The Other Side of the Double Empathy Problem: Making Majority Social Cognition Visible as a Specific Regulatory Architecture

Psychological classification depends on normative baselines against which variation in human behavior is interpreted. Yet these baselines often remain unexamined, embedding the cognitive assumptions of dominant populations into ostensibly universal descriptions of human functioning. 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, which stabilizes interpretation through distributed affective alignment across interacting agents, and internally mediated cognition, which stabilizes interpretation through internally maintained predictive models. Many behaviors currently classified as autistic deficits emerge as predictable consequences of interaction 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. The analysis challenges psychology to examine the normative baselines embedded in its classification systems with the same rigor it applies to describing human variation.