Can an autistic person be emotionally manipulative?

I didn’t find much on this topic on the internet, so I decided to fill in the gap myself and hopefully provide validation for those in a time of need.

Yes, autistic people can be emotionally manipulative. This is most likely to apply in the case of mild ASD where the person is highly capable of masking. The rest of this post assumes this case and clarifies the implications for those who suspect they might be being emotionally manipulated by someone on the spectrum.

The only article I found on this topic suggests that autists can be unintentionally manipulative, that there’s usually an underlying reason to do with alleviating their anxiety or sensory issues, and that autists typically do not have the ability to get inside other people’s heads in a way that there can be intentional manipulation.

I’d like to respond to this portrayal with the following assertions:

• If an autistic person is highly capable of masking, and many are, it means they have consciously and/or subconsciously picked up practical skills and intuition on how to improve other people’s impressions of them. (This is the most minimal form of manipulation, virtually everyone does it, and it’s not an inherently bad thing to do.) Therefore, individuals capable of masking are also capable of conscious manipulation if they want to.
• Emotional manipulation of the harmful kind does not require malicious intent or conscious awareness. It can be unintentional and subconscious, and it does not require the manipulator to have any understanding of the minds of the people they are manipulating.
• Any autistic person capable of masking is also fundamentally capable of unintentional harmful manipulation. This can come about by an autistic person picking up and reinforcing behaviors that influence others in a way that makes their lives easier in the short-term without necessarily knowing why or being aware of how it their subjects are being affected.
• Irrespective of the context of neurodiversity, many victims of bullying and abuse subconsciously develop manipulative behaviors that help win people’s support or favor in a way that incites unhealthy emotional attachment. In the case of younger women who have been abused, it is also common for their manipulative behaviors to particularly target men and induce protective instincts and attraction.

Higher level manipulations

Although autistic people typically value honesty, those on the autistic spectrum are quite capable of telling white lies and bending the truth for their own agenda. Even in autistic individuals who explicitly try to be honest by principle, like anyone else, in the heat of a moment they can end up telling lies in the name of making their lives easier. In fact, harmful and manipulative truth-bending can be a habitual behavior even in autists who at first appear to be honest, and it may be quite difficult to come to an evidenced conclusion that they are engaging in this. Here are some possible categorizations of truth bending, each with different severity and implications:

• The autist may have full awareness of when they bend the truth to their advantage. Like many people, they may hold the stance that the ends justify the means depending on the situation, and therefore this does not necessarily contradict their view of honesty as one of their general virtues.
• They may have virtually no awareness that they’re bending the truth, and no awareness of how their statements affects the recipient.
• They may have partial or delayed awareness, particularly with internal emotions that they can’t decipher immediately in the moment but are fully capable of processing with time and introspection. An autistic person who regularly bends the truth in this way basically says things that are “convenient for them if true” without actually standing on grounds of veracity. If they also have a reasonable comprehension of their own emotions in retrospect and a semblance of understanding in how their words can mislead people in a negative way, then they have the ability to take responsibility for their manipulative behaviors and their consequences. Despite this ability, there may however be a cognitive gap that makes it less likely for manipulative autists to consider it worthwhile reducing or acknowledging their manipulation. Consider the following example:

1. Autist is participating in an emotionally rich interaction.
2. Autist makes a wishful and ultimately misleading claim staked on their hypothesized emotional state despite not really knowing in the moment.
3. The subject takes their claim at face value.
4. Days later the autist becomes aware of their actual emotional stance on the past matter.
5. Autist may not notice or remember their misleading claim, especially if it’s not explicitly brought up again in conversation.
6. Even if they recall that claim, they would need to do some additional processing to realize that the claim was misleading.
7. Even if they realize the claim was misleading, they may need to do some additional processing to realize that the misleading claim could have negative consequences they may care about, which they may not.
8. Even if they realize the misleading claim could have negative consequences, they would need to do additional processing to consider what those consequences might be, or go to the effort of raising it with the subject despite not knowing if it even matters.
9. The whole chain above can easily be stopped at any time by the autist: not being in a position to do such processing at the time; forgetting about any of it at any stage (e.g., due to ADHD or executive dysfunction); not considering the burden worthy of the clarification; having a self-righteous or victim mentality; general lack of cognitive and emotional empathy, or systematically being blind to either negative consequences or the magnitude of these consequences from the perspective of the subject.
10. Due all of the above factors, even the subject were manipulated in a significant and undesirable way, it may be very challenging to broach the subject and reach any kind of resolution with the manipulative autist.

In conclusion, autistic people can be knowingly or unknowingly manipulative in harmful ways, and even those considered generally honest may regularly employ self-serving manipulations for which they are technically able to take responsibility for or remedy, but at significant cost in time, difficulty, and emotional labor.