Unspoken norms: why "difficult" is often the wrong explanation

Why individual remarks add up to something else

For people with ADHD or an autism spectrum condition, this effect matters more. Not because they are more sensitive. But because many have known since school that they do not fit the usual mould. The lesson learned is: it must be me.

Layinka, Shah and Livingston surveyed 123 autistic and ADHD adults in the UK and the USA in Scientific Reports in 2026, using open questions about their adverse experiences and what came out of them. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 72. Responses were coded thematically, producing eight themes across three levels.

Four factors that make adversity more likely

The study first asks what leads someone into difficult situations in the first place. Four factors stood out.

Social factors (55 percent)

Misread social cues, differing communication styles, reactions judged inappropriate by those around them. Some participants described copying behaviour from books or films in order to fit in. That often reinforced the label of being odd or inauthentic.

Emotional factors (55 percent)

Feeling misunderstood and atypical lowered self-esteem, which in turn deepened social difficulties. A loop that builds over years.

Cognitive factors (51 percent)

Attention difficulties, often despite high intelligence, were misread by parents, teachers and peers and met with labels such as "lazy". Executive function difficulties later affected workload, household and finances.

Sensory factors (34 percent)

Overload from noise, bright light, touch or busy movement in environments not built for it. The consequences were frequently read not as overload but as a behavioural problem.

Two forms of adversity

The study sorts the adverse experiences themselves into two categories.

Mistreatment is active poor treatment: bullying (36 percent), abuse (36 percent) and social exclusion (51 percent). One finding stands out: figures of authority such as teachers, parents or supervisors did not merely fail to intervene. In some cases they were the source.

Marginalisation means being pushed toward the margins of society: job insecurity (41 percent), financial instability (40 percent) and neglect (31 percent). Not as a single incident, but as a trajectory over years.

The finding that concerns organizations directly

One detail from the study is uncomfortable for employers. Several participants had disclosed their diagnosis, reasonable adjustments were agreed, and then not implemented in practice. In some cases the outcome was termination. The agreement alone changed nothing.

On top of that comes what appears in no agreement: the unspoken norms. How active or restrained you are expected to be in a meeting. When a follow-up question counts as engaged and when as disruptive. How much eye contact passes as normal. Most people pick these up along the way, without them ever being stated.

This is exactly where the four factors from the study take effect. Anyone who reads social cues differently, or who spends capacity coping with a high-stimulus environment, does not pick up these norms in passing. The feedback still arrives, just in a form that does not help: you need to integrate better.

Three questions before you treat the person as the cause

When someone has been seen as difficult for a while, the simplest explanation usually wins: it must be the person. Situation, environment and history get overlooked. Social psychology calls this the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977).

Harold Kelley described in 1967 how to test this. His covariation model names three dimensions, which translate well into questions.

1. Consensus: do others in the same position react similarly?

If several people struggle at the same interface, the interface is the more likely cause than any individual.

2. Distinctiveness: does the behaviour show up everywhere, or only here?

Someone considered difficult in one team and reliable in another tells you more about the two teams than about themselves.

3. Consistency: does it always occur, or only under certain conditions?

Behaviour that appears in loud open-plan settings and disappears in quiet ones points to conditions, not to character.

Strengths too, but not automatically

The study also asked about strengths that emerged from these experiences. A quarter of participants named resilience, nearly a quarter a marked empathy for others in similar situations.

The third finding matters just as much: 22 percent said they had developed no strengths at all. One participant put it as not needing those experiences to become who they are. They were simply the consequence of a world not built for them.

So the picture of people tempered by hardship does not do the matter justice. Adversity can produce strengths. It does not have to.

What this means for Swiss organizations

In smaller organizations the distances are short, and that cuts both ways. A pattern like this becomes visible faster because fewer layers sit in between. At the same time there is little room to manoeuvre when a working relationship does not function at a particular interface.

What helps requires no programme. Saying out loud the expectations you take for granted is the biggest lever and costs nothing: how does a meeting work here? When are questions welcome? What counts as finished? That benefits not only neurodivergent employees, but also anyone new, anyone changing career, and anyone coming from a different working culture.

And if you are living it yourself right now: starting to question your own perception is not evidence that something is wrong with you. The question is rarely whether someone is too much or too little of something. It is rather why they are asking themselves that question at all.

References

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–238). University of Nebraska Press.

Layinka, O., Shah, P., & Livingston, L. A. (2026). Towards a better understanding of adverse life experiences in autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-61918-4

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 173–220). Academic Press.