Simon Baron-Cohen: Aspergers Less Empathetic than Psycopaths

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Sounds right.

He defines his terms as:
cognitive empathy = identify another person's feelings
affective empathy = respond appropriately to another person's feelings

If 'theory of mind' impairs automatically identifying another person's feelings, then inherently one would have trouble responding to those non-identified feelings ?

i do not have empathy. i can not understand how it feels for others.

I've never met anyone in my life who could easily identify another person's feelings, and I have met A LOT of people.
What kind of criteria is this?

People misunderstand one another ALL THE TIME, as a result of incorrectly identifying someone's feelings, or not noticing the other person's feelings at all.

I've learned that trying to guess another person's feelings and reacting based upon that is almost always the wrong thing to do. I think most problems could be solved if people stopped thinking they were so freakin good at "mind reading" and instead actually asked others how they felt. This definition for empathy has got to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.


--and if NT's are supposedly so great at all this, then why is it that I'm misunderstood at every turn? Despite some awkward body language, and lack of eye contact, shouldn't they be able to use this superpower-level empathy to figure out what autistics are feeling? It sounds fishy to me.

I would have been a great anchoress in an earlier century! Just me, a cat, a bunch of books, and somebody to send meals to me.


The more I hear about Simon and his questionable hypotheses, the more I suspect this is true.

I'm having difficulty figuring out this whole affective epathy vs cognitive empathy thing, but one thing I can tell you is that I care about humanity, I care about others. You could say I care TOO much, to the point that at a certain threshold I have to shut down and isolate because I can't cope with the anxiety that results when it becomes obvious to me just how much others are suffering and I can't help.

My concern is that too many neurotypicals will interpret this man's writings as autistic people as having no morals, ethics, or remorse, and that we're worse than psychopaths. That seems to be the prevailing line of thinking in the media ever since Sandy Hook, and it's sickening.

Actually yes this describes me to a T (whatever that's supposed to mean). Nowadays I try my best to sit back and be an observer and not be affected by the emotional manipulation of others, especially the media, politicians, *coughfacebookcough*, etc., but I do care about people in general, I watch from a disance BECAUSE I care. If I didn't care, I wouldn't even bother observing! So what if I've learned to compartmentalize my emotional responses to a certain extent when necessary and detach if needed; it's very much like building a fortress out of sand to protect against storm surge, eventually it will crumble, and I'll melt down, because I can't cope with the fact that I CARE.

You've hit he nail on the head so to speak, nerds.

Simon Baron-Cohen is talking out his arse and needs a slap

In the future, hopefully the near, people will realize that Simon Baron-Cohen is a hack. Just like Sigmund Freud, who's theories have been mostly discarded by modern psychologists.

In defense of SBC, he is just an NT.

NTs* are not able to empathize with autistics. This is an issue of researcher anosognosia. While many studies do not produce reliable data some research can, but I suspect it is invalid because 1. autism is so loosely defined by behavior and includes a variety of single gene "autism" that the subjects are not defined and 2. researchers don't understand that autistics think very differently than they do. This skews interpretation of the data as well.



I am speaking of NTs as a whole group, there are certainly individual exceptions. Hopefully, we all know exceptions...

I think that NTs have lower empathy than Aspies ( ). The NTs are clinging to social rules, such gender stereotypes or hierarchies.
Aspies have too high affective empathy and they dont know how to cope with it.

EQ do not show the real level of empathy. It is possible that show only the self image on the social domain.
Because the human behaviour is one of my special interests, I have scored 70 on EQ. And because I am a visual and not a logical-mathematical thinker (The world needs all kinds of minds - Temple Grandin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKhg68QJlo0), I have scored only 17 on EQ. It results that I have an extreme female brain!

I looked up affective empathy on Wikipedia ("also called emotional empathy:[30] the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.[29] Our ability to empathize emotionally is supposed to be based on emotional contagion:[30] being affected by another's emotional or arousal state.[31]"), which describes me.

Once I talk to the person about it to fill in the details, I do exhibit the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state.("cognitive empathy"[29][32]). In fact I get really positive feedback about this.

What confuses me is that NTs test with loads of empathy and theory of mind, but functionally (IRL), they show empathy only within their own social group. I can empathize much more broadly given a few extra details.

Simon Baron-Cohen's research is basically pathological science. He knows the results he wants, and he produces tools, studies, etc. to reach those results. In this case, that autism is extreme male brain + lack of empathy. So everything he produces supports these conclusions, even when they do not (the traits chosen for "extreme maleness" are completely arbitrary and cherry-picked and his empathy quotient does not measure empathy).

This is the state of most research today. Research needs funding, so research must please the stakeholders.

Yeah, this guy is full of it.

Ah, Simon Baron-Cohen, or "my psychologist's mancrush". He's always using Baron-Cohen's theories on me, lmao. Lucky (or maybe not...) for him, I am capable of critical thinking.

I'd be the first to admit I don't have much (or anything) in the way of true empathy -- I can't read other peoples' feelings, I can't feel them for myself, etc. -- but I have way more sympathy than the average person. Once the situation is explained to me in a way I understand, I can sympathise with nearly anyone. It gets to the point where I wish I could shut it off because I can sympathise with people who have destructive viewpoints :/