“No One Has to Be Your Friend”: Asperger's Syndrome and the Vicious Cycle of Social Disorder in Late Modern Identity Markets

The past 40 years have seen a significant increase in diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social impairments and restricted or repetitive behaviors. This increase has been particularly marked in the United States, where prevalence estimates have risen from 1 in 2,500 children in 1987 to 1 in 88 today (Baio and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ; Ritvo et al. ). I argue that changing social environments are one factor contributing to this increase by altering trajectories of social development, particularly among those with social‐cognitive vulnerabilities in the absence of comorbid intellectual impairment. In a sociocultural milieu in which friendships and other extra‐familial relationships are increasingly determined by individual choice, with affiliations formed around likeability and the negotiation of mutual positive affect, those who are slower to develop nonverbal awareness, perspective taking, and emotional self‐regulation are often excluded from the flow of social life. Such exclusion results in the rapid amplification of characteristics considered to be deviant, thus perpetuating worsening cycles of exclusion and atypical development.