Contextual Interpersonal Calibration (CIC)

Contextual Interpersonal Calibration (CIC) formalizes an iterative procedure by which an individual observes an interlocutor's responses to different communicative registers, formulates local hypotheses about the exchange, adjusts behavior accordingly, and verifies the outcome of each adjustment. The method addresses first autistic people who meet neurotypical interlocutors daily within workplace and social contexts built on implicit communicative codes; second, clinicians, educators, and researchers who study autism professionally; and third, parents, friends, and anyone who wishes to understand how an autistic person manages the complexity of structured social relationships. Grounded in Milton's double empathy problem, CIC treats communicative mismatch as a gap between two equally valid relational styles, neither defective in itself. The procedure rests on six operational variables (context, register, interactional stimulus, observable response, update, cognitive cost), three levels of inference, and an explicit falsification rule that keeps every calibration hypothesis open to revision. The text positions CIC against Communication Accommodation Theory, single-case experimental design, and Bayesian models of social inference, then presents a twelve-step operational procedure suitable for individual, real-time application. This working paper offers CIC as an operational hypothesis to verify in application, prepared by an independent scholar rather than as an empirically validated claim.