[xyzzy123]

I dunno if Steve was autistic or no but there's a subtype of people who develop a "special interest" in reading, influencing and manipulating people and get quite good at it. They study people carefully - each encounter is a new way to find out how people tick, their motivations and levers. They tend to have unusually good memories of specific encounters and conversations. They can quickly and reliably size people up. You need many many encounters to build this kind of intuition up, so there are specific professions they cluster in that give them lots of practice, cops / detectives, sales, even retail - but you need lots of (ideally non-trivial) interactions to supply the intuition pump.