About Dr Caroline Gorden
Dr Caroline Gorden is a Criminologist, educator, and the founder and director of CESI Learning (Centre for Equity and Systemic Inclusion). She holds a PhD in Criminology, has published over 25 peer-reviewed works, and is co-author of Case Studies of Famous Trials and the Construction of Guilt and Innocence (Bristol Policy Press, 2022). She was formerly Senior Lecturer and Reader at Wrexham University, where she co-directed Cyfiawnder: The Social Inclusion Research Institute, and remains a Visiting Research Associate there.
Who this is for: HR professionals, managers, investigators, and anyone delivering or receiving autism training within workplace disciplinaries, grievances, or investigations.
What this covers: Why credibility, not communication, is so often the real issue when autistic employees are misjudged in formal processes.
Why it matters: Because the habits that shape guilt and innocence in a courtroom shape outcomes in a disciplinary hearing too, and most people running these processes have never been shown how.
Autism Training and Why Credibility Is Constructed, Not Discovered
Autism training matters. It determines whether formal workplace processes get credibility right. I spent a long time reading and writing about criminal trials. My book examined cases where guilt and innocence were shaped as much by psychological, sociological, and legal factors, media narratives, perceived credibility, vulnerability, as by the physical evidence itself. At the time, this felt like a question about courtrooms specifically: high-profile cases, juries, cross-examination, the particular theatre of a trial.
Then I started working directly with autistic people in the workplace, and I saw the same mechanism at work in far more ordinary rooms.
A meeting room. A disciplinary hearing. An investigation interview. No jury, no media coverage, often no legal representation at all. And yet the same underlying process was playing out: someone’s account being weighed not on what actually happened, but on how believable they appeared while saying it.
We Are Always Either Defending Credibility, or Judging It
Once you start looking for this pattern, it is difficult to stop seeing it. In almost every workplace interaction with any stakes attached, someone is defending their own credibility, or forming a judgement about someone else’s. A manager deciding whether to believe an employee’s account of a conflict. An investigator weighing up two conflicting versions of the same meeting. A colleague deciding, almost instinctively, whether someone seems genuine.
What I have come to understand is that credibility itself is not a neutral thing we simply detect in another person. It is constructed, built from a narrow set of behavioural cues that most of us have absorbed without ever examining them: steady eye contact, a warm and responsive tone, quick and fluent answers, visible emotional expression that matches the moment. These cues form a kind of unspoken template, and we read against that template constantly, usually without realising we are doing it at all.
The problem is that this template is neurotypical. It was never built with autistic communication in mind, and it was never tested against it either.
When Autistic Expression Meets a Neurotypical Template
Autistic communication frequently diverges from that template in exactly the ways most likely to be misread. A precise, literal account can look evasive against a template that expects hedging and social softening. Gaze aversion, common and often necessary for autistic people managing sensory or cognitive load, gets read as a lack of directness or an unwillingness to be pinned down. A flat or measured emotional tone gets read as a lack of remorse or concern, when it may simply be how someone processes and communicates distress. Longer pauses before answering get read as evasiveness or fabrication, rather than as genuine processing time.
None of these behaviours describe what actually happened. They describe whether a person’s presentation matches a template built around neurotypical norms alone.
I was struck recently by an essay from Eva Redford, an Institutional Design Theorist, examining exactly this mechanism across the wider justice system, courts, custody proceedings, interrogation rooms, describing how averted eyes get read as deception, how a flat voice gets read as a lack of remorse, how a literal answer gets read as evasiveness. Reading it, what struck me was not how different the justice system is from a workplace disciplinary, but how alike they are. The uniform changes. The underlying evidentiary habit does not.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong
When credibility is judged through the wrong template, the person paying the price is rarely the one who did anything wrong. They are the person whose natural communication style simply did not match what the room expected. An autistic employee can find themselves formally disciplined, or dismissed from their own account of events entirely, not because of what they did, but because of how they said it.
This is not a hypothetical risk. It is a foreseeable, repeatable outcome of running formal processes without ever examining the assumptions built into how credibility gets judged. And it is entirely avoidable, once the people running these processes are equipped to recognise the difference between how someone communicates and what they are actually communicating.
Why Autism Training Can Change the Outcome
This is the exact gap CESI Learning’s autism training was built to close. Not by asking autistic employees to perform credibility differently, but by equipping the people running disciplinaries, grievances, and investigations to recognise when their own instincts are the thing leading them astray. Fairness in these processes depends on it.
This is exactly what CESI Learning’s course, Effective Interviewing of Autistic Employees in Investigations, Grievances, and Disciplinaries, was built to address: Autism Interview Training Course | CESI Learning
References
Gorden, C. and Birkbeck, C. (2022) Case Studies of Famous Trials and the Construction of Guilt and Innocence. Bristol: Bristol Policy Press.
Redford, E. (2026) How the Justice System Excludes Neurodivergent People by Design, LinkedIn, 11th July. Available at: (1) How the Justice System Excludes Neurodivergent People by Design (2026, Research) | LinkedIn
