Flora’s Kiss Blog

Manipulation, the crowd, guilt, and why neurodivergent people so often lose a game they never agreed to play

29 September 2026 · Deep Dive

If you are neurodivergent, there is a good chance you know this experience. You notice a pattern. The meeting nobody told you about. The joke that always seems to land on you. The colleague who is warm one-on-one and cold the moment anyone else is in the room. It happens again, and again, and you keep a quiet tally in your head.

Eventually you take it to someone whose job is to help — a counsellor, a psychologist, a manager, a friend. And you hear some version of: “You can’t really know what they were thinking. Maybe they were having a bad day. Could you be reading too much into it?”

You go home doubting the one thing you were sure of.

This piece is an attempt to explain why that happens. Not to excuse anyone, but because understanding the machinery makes it much easier to stop blaming yourself for being caught in it. We will start with the oldest parts of human social behaviour, move through how crowds, hierarchy, guilt and manipulation actually work, look at why neurodivergent people so often end up targeted and then disbelieved, and finish with what better support looks like.

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Part One: The Old Machinery

We Evolved to Belong — Because Being Alone Is Dangerous

For almost all of human history, being cast out of your group meant losing protection, food-sharing and help when you were sick or injured. Being excluded was not a social inconvenience. It was dangerous.

It still is. Exclusion today rarely means being left alone in the wild, but it still strips away protection. An excluded person has fewer allies to back them up, fewer witnesses when something goes wrong, and fewer people who will believe them. They can lose work, income, housing, references and access to services. And they become an easier target, because hurting someone nobody will defend carries little risk. We come back to this in Part Three. The cost is physical as well: a major review of 148 studies found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the study periods, an effect comparable to well-known health risks such as smoking.¹

Psychologists Robert Kurzban and Mark Leary argued that humans evolved dedicated mental systems for deciding who to exclude — people who seem like unreliable partners, people who might carry disease, and people who belong to a rival group.² The catch is that these systems work on quick cues: someone seeming unreliable, unfamiliar or different. They do not wait for a careful judgement of whether the person actually is. Someone who is honest and dependable but communicates differently can still set them off.

Rejection also hurts in a way that feels physical. In a widely replicated experiment, people who are left out of a simple online ball-tossing game — by strangers they will never meet — report lower mood and a weaker sense of belonging and control, within minutes.³ Early brain-imaging work suggested that social exclusion activates regions that overlap with physical pain processing, although exactly how close that overlap is remains debated.⁴

So the first piece of old machinery is simple: humans are built to fear exclusion, and to exclude others, fast.

Why Crowds Win

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch sat volunteers in a room with a group of actors and asked everyone to judge which of three lines matched a reference line. The answer was obvious. But on certain rounds, every actor confidently gave the same wrong answer before the real participant spoke. About a third of the time, participants went along with the obviously wrong majority, and most went along at least once.⁵

People conform for two broad reasons: because they assume the group probably knows something they don’t, and because going against the group feels socially risky. Conformity is cheap insurance. Most of the time, the crowd is not thinking — it is staying safe.

A small study using a child-friendly version of Asch’s task found that autistic children were noticeably less likely to go along with a wrong majority, and that higher autistic traits went with lower conformity.⁶ It was a small sample of children, so it should be treated as a hint rather than a settled finding — but it fits what a great many autistic adults describe. If you don’t feel the pull to agree, you say what you actually see.

Here is the catch. When everyone else goes along and you don’t, you are not just “wrong” in the group’s eyes. You are a signal that you might not be fully of the group — and the old exclusion machinery notices.

Hierarchy: The Rules Nobody Writes Down

Researchers describe two main routes to status in human groups. Dominance is influence through fear and pressure. Prestige is influence that others give freely because they admire someone’s skill or knowledge.⁷ Most workplaces, families and friendship circles run on a mixture of both.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm pointed out that hunter-gatherer groups also actively cut down would-be bullies — mocking, shunning or expelling people who tried to dominate. He called this a “reverse dominance hierarchy”.⁸ Humans, in other words, evolved both the urge to climb and the urge to punish climbers. Which one wins depends on the group.

What matters for neurodivergent people is how status is communicated. Very little of it is spoken. It is carried in who speaks first, whose jokes get laughed at, who gets included in the side conversation, who is allowed to disagree with whom and in what tone. Everyone is expected to pick this up. Nobody teaches it.

This is where the charge of rigidity gets turned upside down. Autistic people are often labelled rigid because they hold to rules, routines and literal meanings. But the unwritten hierarchy is itself extraordinarily rigid. Correct a senior person in public, talk at length about something you know well, fail to laugh at the right moment, ask a direct question about a decision that was “already made” — and the social penalties arrive quickly and reliably. You could fairly say many social groups are flexible about what is said, and very rigid about who gets to say it.

Flexible about what is said. Rigid about who gets to say it.

That is a reframe rather than a research finding about individuals — plenty of non-autistic people are thoughtful and flexible, and plenty of autistic people are not. But it names something real: the rigidity you are accused of is often being measured against a rulebook that is just as rigid, only invisible.

A Verdict in Seconds

In 2017, researcher Noah Sasson and colleagues showed people very brief clips (10 seconds or less) of autistic and non-autistic adults and children in ordinary social situations. The first impressions of the autistic people were less favourable across a range of traits, and viewers said they were less willing to interact with them. These judgements formed within seconds, held for both children and adults, and did not soften with longer exposure. When raters read only a transcript of what the autistic people said, the difference disappeared — so it was the presentation, not the content, that triggered the negative verdict.⁹

Read that again, because it is the heart of this article. The verdict is formed before your intelligence, your kindness, your generosity or your honesty has had a chance to show. And a clip only seconds long was enough for it to leak through — which is part of why even careful masking rarely fully wins. Masking also comes at a cost: autistic adults describe it as exhausting, and researchers have argued it is shaped less by free choice than by stigma and the need to stay safe.¹⁰

There is hope in the same body of work. A follow-up study found first impressions improved when observers were told the person was autistic and when they knew more about autism.¹¹ The verdict is fast, but it is not fixed.

The Double Empathy Problem

For decades, autism research described autistic people as lacking social understanding. In 2012, autistic researcher Damian Milton proposed something different: that when autistic and non-autistic people misunderstand each other, the breakdown runs both ways. Each side struggles to read the other. But because non-autistic people are the majority, their misreadings are treated as normal, and autistic misreadings are treated as a disorder. He called this the double empathy problem.¹²

A 2020 study tested this by passing a story along chains of people, like the children’s game of telephone. Autistic-only chains shared information as well as non-autistic-only chains did; mixed chains lost more information and reported lower rapport.¹³

In fairness, a much larger replication across three sites, published in 2025, did not find the information-sharing drop in mixed groups. It confirmed that autistic people share information just as well as non-autistic people do. What it found on rapport was more mixed: people in all-non-autistic groups rated rapport highest, rapport in mixed groups was lower than that, and knowing each other’s diagnosis improved rapport.¹⁴ So the honest picture is this: autistic people communicate perfectly well, and the feeling of friction in mixed company is real and measurable, even if the research is still working out exactly where it sits.

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Part Two: How Control Works

Manipulation in Plain Terms

In 1987, psychologist David Buss catalogued the everyday tactics people use to get others to do things: charm, the silent treatment, coercion, reasoning, regression (sulking, whining or pouting) and debasement (making yourself seem lowly or helpless).¹⁵ Almost everyone uses some of these sometimes. That, on its own, is just human influence.

Influence becomes harmful manipulation when it is covert, repeated, and aimed at getting you to act against your own interests while the other person keeps deniability. A few patterns come up again and again:

• “I was only joking.” “That’s not what I meant.” Each incident is small enough to explain away.
• Making your reaction the problem. The conversation shifts from what they did to how “sensitive” or “intense” you are about it.
• Recruiting the group. Others are quietly brought onside before you even know there is a conflict, so by the time you raise it, you are already outnumbered.
• Intermittent warmth. Kind in private, cold in public — or the reverse. The occasional kindness keeps you hoping and doubting.
• Moving goalposts. Whatever you do to fix things, the standard shifts.

These are not clinical terms. They are patterns worth being able to recognise.

How Guilt Is Used as a Lever

Guilt is not a flaw. Roy Baumeister and colleagues showed that guilt is fundamentally a relationship emotion: it pushes us to notice when we have hurt someone we care about and to repair it. That is its main job. But the same review also described guilt as an influence technique — a way people, especially those with less direct power, get others to do what they want.¹⁶

This is the cruel part. Guilt only works on people who care about being fair and good. The more conscientious, honest and rule-abiding you are, the easier you are to guilt. Many autistic people describe a strong sense of justice and a deep commitment to doing the right thing. That is a genuine strength, and it is also exactly the handle a manipulative person reaches for.

Some signs that guilt is being used against you rather than arising from something you actually did:

• The guilt is far out of proportion to the event.
• Your apology is never quite enough, and repair is always your job.
• Their need is reframed as your wrongdoing (“If you really cared, you would…”).
• You feel guilty for having noticed a problem at all.

“Be Good and You’ll Get What You Deserve”

Many of us were raised on a promise: be honest, work hard, be kind, follow the rules, and things will work out.

Psychologist Melvin Lerner spent decades studying why this belief is so common. He called it the belief in a just world — the deep need to believe that people generally get what they deserve.¹⁷ It makes the world feel orderly and safe. It is also useful for raising children, which is part of why parents teach it with such sincerity.

The research has a darker side. When people see someone suffering unfairly, one common way to protect the belief is to decide the victim must have done something to bring it on — to find a flaw in them.¹⁸

For neurodivergent people this lands twice:

• You may have taken the promise literally. If you were told that goodness is rewarded, and you took that as a rule, you kept following it — and kept waiting for the fairness that was supposed to come. When it didn’t, the natural conclusion was that you must not be good enough yet.
• The people you tell may protect their own belief. “Maybe you misread it” is, among other things, a way for the listener to keep their world orderly. If you were mistreated for no reason, the world is unsafe. If you misunderstood, it isn’t.

The truth is harder and kinder at the same time: being good is necessary for a good life, but it has never been sufficient for safety.

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Part Three: Why Some People Become Targets

Bullying Is Rarely Random

It is tempting to think of bullying as something broken in the bully. Some researchers take a more uncomfortable view: that bullying is often goal-directed behaviour — a strategy for gaining status, social dominance or resources, used against someone with less power.¹⁹

Research on bullying in peer groups found that people who bully tend to pick targets who are submissive, insecure and already less accepted by the group — because those targets are safe. Nobody is likely to defend them, so the bully gains status at little risk, and the group often rewards it by laughing along or staying silent.²⁰

Translate that to adult life and the picture becomes clear. The ideal target is someone:

• with fewer allies in the group,
• whose complaints are less likely to be believed,
• who won’t retaliate socially,
• who tends to trust, follow rules and assume good faith.

Now look back at the verdict formed in seconds, the double empathy gap, the unwritten hierarchy and guilt as a lever. Being singled out is not a sign of a character flaw. It is a sign that someone has done the arithmetic.

The Numbers

A 2023 meta-analysis pooling 34 studies found that around 44% of autistic people had experienced some form of victimisation, rising to 47% for bullying specifically. The smaller group of studies that measured several kinds of victimisation found a pooled rate of 84% for experiencing more than one type.²¹ The studies varied a great deal, so these are best read as an indication of scale rather than precise population figures — but the scale is stark.

What Autistic Adults Say Themselves

When Amy Pearson and colleagues asked 43 autistic adults about being taken advantage of by people they knew, two themes stood out: cycles of victimisation — being targeted repeatedly, by different people across life — and difficulties with trust, recognising abuse, and heightened compliance. The title of the study comes from one participant’s words, looking back: this was just how this friendship worked.²²

A second study from the same team captured the internal cost in its title — “I felt like I deserved it because I was autistic.” Participants described coming to expect mistreatment as normal, the toll of masking and burnout, and something researchers call hermeneutical injustice: not having the words or frameworks to make sense of what had happened to them until much later.²³ Other researchers have noted that autistic adults themselves point to difficulty reading intentions, a longing for acceptance after years of exclusion, and being open and trusting as reasons they were targeted.²⁴

Seeing the Pattern vs. Reading the Moment

This is where two things that seem to contradict each other are both true.

Many neurodivergent people are genuinely strong at noticing patterns over time — the tally in your head is often accurate. At the same time, the research above shows that reading someone’s intent in the moment, especially someone close to you, can be hard, and that many autistic adults only recognised abuse in hindsight.

Skilled manipulation lives exactly in that gap. Each individual incident is small and deniable. It is only the pattern that is damning.

Which is why “you can’t know what they were thinking” is such a damaging response. It zooms in on the single incident — where you are weakest and they are most deniable — and throws away the pattern, which is where all your evidence lives.

It zooms in on the single incident, where you are weakest, and throws away the pattern, where your evidence lives.

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Part Four: When Help Hurts

Where the “Benefit of the Doubt” Reflex Comes From

Many counsellors and psychologists are trained in cognitive behavioural approaches, which teach people to spot common thinking traps, such as “jumping to conclusions”, “mind reading” (assuming you know what others think) and “personalisation” (assuming things are about you).^25,26 For many people with anxiety, learning to catch these can be genuinely helpful.

The problem comes when that tool is applied to someone describing a repeated pattern of real mistreatment. Treating each report as a possible thinking error puts the whole burden on the person being harmed, and none on the person doing it. There are also understandable reasons professionals are cautious: they only ever hear one side, and they are trained not to take sides. But neutrality between a documented pattern and a convenient denial is not really neutral.

Epistemic Injustice: Not Being Believed Because of Who You Are

Philosopher Miranda Fricker gave us precise language for this. Testimonial injustice is when someone’s account is given less credibility because of assumptions about who they are. Hermeneutical injustice is when someone lacks the shared concepts needed to make sense of, or explain, their own experience.²⁷

Philosophers Amandine Catala and colleagues have argued that autistic people face many forms of this, including assumptions about their social understanding.²⁸ When an autistic adult’s account of being mistreated is discounted because “autistic people misread social cues”, that is testimonial injustice in its clearest form — the very trait being used to dismiss the report is the one the research shows cuts both ways.

What Autistic Adults Report About Therapy

In interviews with 19 autistic adults, being invalidated by a therapist came up as one of the least helpful parts of therapy, something that can wear down self-esteem and lead people to stop going early. Participants also described the frustration of going over situations they could not change, and earlier research found autistic adults often want practical recommendations rather than sessions spent mainly on processing emotions.²⁹ In another study, participants described being blamed for their lack of progress and not being believed that they were in distress.³⁰

This matters beyond comfort. In a 2026 study, 106 autistic adults with a history of suicidal thoughts were asked whether invalidation had contributed to those thoughts; the researchers found invalidation was common, came from many sources, and often centred on people’s autistic traits and mental health.³¹ More broadly, researchers have applied the minority stress model to autistic people — the idea that stigma, having to hide who you are, and constantly expecting rejection all wear down mental health over time.³²

A Word About “Gaslighting”

The word gaslighting describes deliberately making someone doubt their own perception. Most therapists who reach for “maybe they were having a bad day” are not trying to deceive you — they are applying training that doesn’t fit your situation. The effect, though, can be the same: you leave doubting something you perceived accurately.

Naming it precisely can actually help. “When you suggest I might be misreading things, I end up doubting a pattern I’ve documented. I need us to look at the pattern first” is something a good therapist can hear and work with. And plenty of therapists do this work very well. The failure is one of fit and training, not of therapy itself.

What Good Support Looks Like

Good support does not mean agreeing with everything you say. It means taking your account seriously first, and then helping you act on it. In practice:

• Validation before analysis. Your experience is believed before it is examined.
• Pattern, not just incident. Incidents are looked at together, over time.
• Behaviour, not intent. You do not need to read anyone’s mind to protect yourself. Boundaries respond to what someone does, not to what they meant.
• Recognition skills. Learning the common manipulation and guilt patterns so you can spot them earlier.
• Practical tools. Keeping a simple written log (dates, what was said, who was there), scripts for boundaries, deciding who to tell, and planning an exit when a situation cannot be fixed.
• Time with people of your own neurotype. Autistic adults often describe feeling better understood, and more able to be themselves, around other autistic people.³³
• Trauma treated as trauma. Years of targeting and disbelief are not a thinking style to be corrected.

Boundaries respond to what someone does, not to what they meant.

Here is how that shift sounds in practice:

Questions Worth Asking a New Counsellor or Psychologist

• What experience and training do you have working with autistic or ADHD adults?
• When a client describes being mistreated, how do you balance validating them with exploring other perspectives?
• Do you teach practical skills — boundaries, documentation, recognising manipulation?
• Are you familiar with the double empathy problem and neurodiversity-affirming practice?

Neurodiversity-affirming therapy is still a young field and its evidence base is developing, so the label alone is not a guarantee. The answers to questions like these, and how you feel after the first few sessions, will tell you more.

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Part Five: Putting It Together

So how is a neurodivergent person harmed and beaten before they begin? Not by one thing, but by a chain of ordinary things that stack:

• A verdict in seconds. First impressions form before your qualities can show, and they tend to stick.⁹
• Fewer allies. Lower rapport in mixed company means fewer people automatically in your corner.^13,14
• Invisible rules, visible penalties. Unwritten hierarchy is broken without knowing it, and punished anyway.
• Not going along with the crowd. Honest disagreement can read as not belonging.
• Strengths turned into handles. Trust, fairness, rule-following and a conscience that responds to guilt are exactly what manipulation leverages.
• Deniable incidents. Each moment is small; only the pattern is damning.
• When you report it, the “autistic people misread things” assumption and the listener’s own need for a just world both work against you.
• The cost of trying harder. Masking to prevent all of this is exhausting and linked to more anxiety and depression.³⁴

Each link is ordinary. Stacked together, it is a system that has largely decided the outcome before you walk into the room.

But it is not destiny. Knowledge and disclosure measurably improve first impressions.¹¹ Belonging among your own neurotype is real and restorative.³³ And naming the pattern — having words for what is happening — is itself protective. It is the opposite of hermeneutical injustice.

You were not imagining things or reading too much into them. You were seeing a pattern that other people found easier not to look at.

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What the Evidence Doesn’t Support

A few claims circulate in neurodivergent spaces that deserve an honest flag.

• “Neurotypical people are all rigid and hierarchical.” The rigidity of unwritten social rules is real, but individuals vary enormously. The reframe above is about norms, not about every person.
• “Autistic people are immune to manipulation because they don’t conform.” Resisting a crowd is not the same as being protected in close relationships. The research on autistic adults points the other way for manipulation by people they know and trust.²²
• “Evolution explains bullying, so it’s natural and inevitable.” Evolution may explain a tendency. Humans also evolved to band together and punish bullies.⁸ Which one wins is shaped by culture, leadership and who speaks up.
• “Any therapist who asks me to consider another view is gaslighting me.” Considering other perspectives has a place — after your experience has been believed, not instead of it.
• “Rejection sensitive dysphoria” as a diagnosis. The term is widely used in ADHD communities to describe intense pain in response to rejection, and many people recognise themselves in it. It is not a formal diagnosis and has very little research behind it. It can be a useful description; it should not be mistaken for an established finding.

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