> We are extremely sensitive to the inner mental lives of others and respond both consciously and unconsciously.

This is so wrong it's hilarious.

Humans are terrible at ascribing meaning to what other people do. It even spawned a saying: "We judge others by what they do; we judge ourselves by what we intend."

As such, we, as humans, generally have zero idea what is going on in someone else's brain when they do something unexpected (it is unexpected after all). An individual has to work very hard to "cut others slack" under most conditions.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few bad social actors nowadays who attempt to take advantage of that, and there don't seem to be quite as many people who will take those bad actors on.

I don't think it's really wrong to say most are sensitive to external indications of others' internal experience. Simultaneously, as you point out, we're often pretty bad at inferring intentions from this information. But we have much more than zero idea what's going on, in most cases; the amount we know and our level of certainty could be viewed as a function of cultural context, group cohesion, cooperation/competition under stress, individual differences, power dynamics, social norms, etc.

> It even spawned a saying: "We judge others by what they do; we judge ourselves by what we intend."

There is much evidence for an effect like this in social psychology, commonly called the fundamental attribution error.

I'll just suggest to you personally and quite seriously that even if you have zero idea what's going on in someone else's head, most other people have an immediate and intuitive idea of what's going on, so intuitive in fact that they often mistake the thoughts and feelings of others as their own. This is my daily lived experience, as fundamental as gravity and atmospheric pressure.

> As such, we, as humans, generally have zero idea what is going on in someone else's brain when they do something unexpected (it is unexpected after all).

The thing is, we don't do unexpected things in front of each other all that often. Which is why neurotypical people generally do have a sense for each other's state of mind.

Aspies have trouble with this even in normal situations.

Well then what is it that people on the Asperger spectrum are missing, if it is not this ability?

You are asking a question that psychologists can't even definitively answer yet, you know.

That's not true. We don't know the causes of Asbergers, but there is lots known about their cognitive and behavioral deficits.