Autistic Employees Outsmart the Dunning–Kruger Effect (And Yes, I’m Saying This as Someone with a Degree in Labor Studies)

Thursday, December 11, 2025.

Before anyone sends me an email beginning with “Well, actually,” let me open with an apology—the academic kind, not the sincere kind.

Besides Marriage and Family Therapy, I also have a degree in Labor Studies, and I am a published researcher in the field.
Which means I have spent an absurd amount of time understanding workplaces, workers, and the elaborate mythologies they construct about their own competence.

So if this piece sounds judgmental, know that I say all of this with all kindness and respect for working people and… let’s call it realistic expectations of their self-awareness.

With that out of the way:
A new study in Autism Research shows that autistic employees are far less susceptible to the Dunning–Kruger effect than their non-autistic peers.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you already knew this.

The Bias Holding Up Half the Corporate World

The Dunning–Kruger effect, for the fortunate few unfamiliar with it, is the cognitive bias in which people who know the least believe they know the most. It’s the psychological foundation of:

• Overconfident dipshit managers.

• Catastrophically bad decisions delivered with perfect posture.

• Performance reviews written like campaign speeches.

• And the unmistakable human tendency to confuse enthusiasm with ability.

If competence were correlated with confidence, America’s workplaces would run like Swiss railways.
Instead, most resemble karaoke nights where the people singing loudest believe they are recording an album.

The Study: Actual Thinking Meets Self-Evaluation

Researchers recruited 100 employed adults—53 autistic, 47 non-autistic—and administered the CRT-Long, a task requiring participants to override the first wrong answer that pops out of the brain like a toaster on fire.

Then participants were asked the most dangerous question in organizational life:
“How do you think you did?”

This is where self-perception normally enters the realm of speculative fiction.

Low Performers: A Study in Ambition Over Evidence

Predictably, low performers overestimated their abilities. This is not a surprise; it is practically a job requirement in certain industries.

But among these low performers, autistic adults overestimated themselves far less than their non-autistic peers—who answered the self-assessment section with the breezy confidence of people accustomed to being congratulated for showing up.

The autistic participants drifted slightly above reality.
The non-autistic participants drifted into mythology.

Middle Performers: Accuracy vs. Helium

Middle performers behaved the same way:

• Autistic adults remained tethered to the terrestrial plane.

• While non-autistic adults floated upward like they’d swallowed a weather balloon.

The difference?
Autistic employees do not use self-evaluation as a form of personal branding.

High Performers: The One Twist That Matters

Here’s what I found intriguing. Both groups underestimated themselves—a classic reversal of Dunning–Kruger.

But autistic high performers underestimated themselves more.

Not because of insecurity.
Because of calibration.

They do not assume that if something feels obvious to them, it must feel obvious to everyone. This is called humility. Or accuracy. Or, in some corners of corporate America, “a poor cultural fit.”

Why Autistic Employees See Themselves Clearly

Researchers suggest autistic adults may be less vulnerable to social influence and self-delusion—two of the workplace’s most valued competencies.

But a more direct explanation is obvious:

Autistic adults aren’t magically insightful.
Everyone else is simply very bad at knowing anything about themselves.

Autistic cognition tends to be:

• Less distorted by ego.

• Less swayed by performance norms.

• Less dependent on collective illusion.

• And less committed to maintaining a flattering narrative at all costs.

This is disastrous for environments where self-promotion is considered a transferable skill.

A Brief Scene from Every Meeting I’ve Ever Observed (Labor Studies, After All)

A real problem is presented.
One autistic employee offers the correct answer.
Two competent employees offer measured answers.
A manager—armed with confidence, PowerPoint, and absolutely no supporting evidence—offers a definitive answer.

Guess who is praised for “leadership.”
Guess who is told they’re “too literal.”
Guess who is quietly fixing the dumpster fire three weeks later.

This is not a cognitive mystery.
This is an American management style.

The Limitations: Scientific, Not Psychological

Yes, yes—age differences, employed samples, analytic rather than social tasks.
There are always limitations.
Science must acknowledge them.

But human ego?
Human ego respects no such boundaries.

The Larger, More Inconvenient Truth

This study gently suggests something radical:

Maybe autistic people aren’t the outliers.
Maybe they’re the baseline.

Maybe autistic employees aren’t “missing something.”
Maybe they’re simply unaffected by the illusions the rest of the population sustains like a shared religion because they don’t live in stories about themselves.

When asked to evaluate themselves:

• Autistic employees gave reality.

• Non-autistic employees gave memoir proposals.

And in a country run by people who consistently overestimate themselves—politically, professionally, and personally—accuracy becomes a kind of rebellion.

Because if autistic employees truly are the only ones seeing themselves clearly, the question is not what this says about autism.

It’s what it says about everyone else.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.