Little is known regarding the listening experiences of autistic individuals during naturalistic speech-in-noise paradigms. Common traits that lead to a diagnosis of autism often lie within the domain of social communication challenges and altered reactivity to sensory stimuli—which together may result in autistic individuals struggling during social environments, particularly noisy ones. Autistic individuals have been shown to demonstrate variations in cognitive abilities such as theory of mind, working memory, and attention that have been believed to lead to the noted social communication challenges. However, according to social motivation theories, autistic individuals may lack a specific social motivation to engage in social interactions, which subsequently leads to an inexperience that results in weaker developed social-cognitive traits. Therefore, we hypothesized that motivation in the form of prosociality might be associated to the amount of effort an individual would exert during a social interaction in a noisy environment; specifically, more prosocial individuals might be exerting more effort. To address the various factors that affect listening performance and effort during noisy environments, we recruited a sample of autistic individuals (N = 27) from the Greater London Area with an age and IQ matched control group (N = 22). The methods implemented included behavioral tasks probing speech-perception-in-noise thresholds, working memory, musical perception skills, and social orientation via questionnaires. We then had participants listen to an audiobook-in-noise whilst an eye tracker recorded the evoked pupil responses during ideal and adverse listening conditions. Our results demonstrated several key findings. During the audiobook-in-noise, the autistic group (N = 13) demonstrated an increasing amount of effort and arousal throughout the duration of the audiobook in all conditions, whereas the control group (N = 11) only showed increasing arousal. Linear mixed models found that the key factors influencing mean evoked pupil size and variance in the autistic group were the speech condition, the occurrence of the condition, age, working memory, autistic traits, and prosociality. In the control group, age was the only factor having a significant effect on effort and arousal during the audiobook task. The findings here demonstrate that autistic individuals may be utilizing a dynamic combination of cognitive and social traits to help their engagement during a naturalistic speech-in-noise paradigm. Moreover, prosociality was strongly anticorrelated to working memory, thus there may be a complex tradeoff between social traits and cognition underlying listening effort in autism that studies should explore in the future.