A thought about empathy

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NT's are said to be good at empathy. Which from what I have read means they have facial expressions, body language, verbal intonations and "theory of mind" mind-reading abilities that let them sense and reflect what another is feeling. Person A is sad and his/her face looks downcast. Person B responds empatheticly by matching the face, body language and intonations of A. NTs talk about it as if that adds up to person B feeling compassion.

But maybe empathy is really a non-verbal, sub-conscious form of manipulation at heart. I mean, as to how all this evolved in the first place (going back to our primate ancestors here.) By matching person A's feeling state, person B will create trust and comraderee and increase his/her chance of making gains of some kind or another, at the time or later.

Since NT's rule the world, and they are so empathetic, why is there so much cruelty? I mean, they are the ones starting wars, ripping people off and bullying us and not the other way around. And autistic spectrum people are usually very concerned with fairness, justice and other forms of genuine compassion. It seems like a person can be compassionate with out the empathetic displays, or lack compassion and be a master of conveying them.

I couldn't agree more.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a million times: we don’t feel empathy any differently than NTs; they’re just better at faking it because it’s expected of them.

Depends on how you define empathy. I have strong sympathy for how others feel but I have no empathy in that I do not pick up naturally how somebody is feeling unless they tell me or I have other information.

Now having a conversation with a friend who is NT, she says that if someone tells her a sad or happy story she has a physical sensation in her body of the emotion they are relating and that's what she thinks of as empathy. She thinks that what I describe in my original post here is faking empathy.

I rarely feel a physical sensation of a like emotion of another person, although I can feel very strong emotions in myself. Also, I can have this physical response to an animal that is in distress or even an tree or an object that I value that is being harmed.

But I do feel sympathy for people, that is in my mind I can understand another's emotion and feel compassion and I only have had a feeling of cruel desire toward a couple of people who harmed me very egregiously.

I believe the hypothesis that NT's have more empathy and ASD's have less empathy is FALSE.

I myself... diagnosed AS as a child, was pretty much 'tunnel vision' socially as a child.
But as I moved on to high school and college my brain opened up and went to the extreme end of the empathy spectrum. So much so that, I can sense people's emotions accutely, and I absorb them like a sponge...

I do not believe ASD's lack empathy any more than NT's.

The reason is that ASD is what they call 'lack of neuron connections', not 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP etc symptoms' ie...
Not all autistics display the same symptoms as well, I myself do not 'stim'.

I myself have EXTREME empathy, but CANNOT reciprocate emotionally... ie SHOW my empathy... but INSIDE extremely empathetic.
Also as much as I would like hugging, and DO like hugging people, and WOULD LIKE TO show more love towards people, there is an AS 'block' as much as I would like to... But with animals that is a different story

Well said and I totally agree with you.