They tell police working on a case where someone is holding hostages that if they find out said hostage taker is a psychopath, they must reverse course, using a different set of tactics to try to get the hostages freed.

I feel a similar way with people in social situations.  It’s not sufficient to just let me know things, I have to be told them.  I had a negative experience in high school which in hindsight was very life giving.  I was thinking of joining chorus again but before doing so I asked point blank the group of guys that hung out with my best friend if they’d accept me.  They said no.  It was hurtful at the time but that ounce of hurt saved me ten pounds of hurt had I tried joining the chorus again and attempted to fit in with the group.

Fast forward to me at age thirty, trying to join a church to get socially established.  I get rejected.  I am naturally painfully shy so I would pump these people for conversation and once I stopped they would shut off.  After way too long I eventually quit engaging church people all together.  So I find out later from a reliable source that the reason people were not kind to me was because I didn’t have a real job.  Now had those church people just told me that outright I would have tried harder to get a real job and/or stopped associating with them much sooner.

Now this dilemma of whether or not to be painfully direct really leaves the neurotypical in a pretty impossible situation.  Some people like to be told things up front (a lot of aspies fall into this category) while others like a more nuanced approach.  Knowing which approach to take requires knowing said person pretty well.  If one is blunt to someone that can’t take it, that person will probably not talk to you again.  Conversely some people (me included) don’t get the “hints” of more nuanced communication so we need to be told everything up front.

From my perspective social grace is just a smokescreen to cover the lack of actual grace.  It may have served more of a function when the culture had more constructive social rules but that time has passed.