Autistic Empathy versus Neurotypical Empathy

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IMO I say NT's. I'm odd with empathy. Christopher Reeves died I cried into a sink John Ritter/Steve Irwin I felt sad a little inside. 9/11 I laughed my head off and didn't care. Katrina and other issues even all the hurricanes of 2004 in FL (where I live) I didn't really care IMO I was like that's what a hurricane IS! (Although I didn't like losing power) From what I've seen on tv I'd be far MORE SCARED of a tornado (of course I know they can spin off from the Hurricane. Also if someone falls and skins there knee I don't care and yet when my little sister got a busted lip last Sunday I freaked out!! ! LOL! Also back on the 9/11 war issue I'm sure most NT's and maybe AS people etc. worried about the War in Iraq etc. we're fighting over there etc. etc. IMO I DON'T CARE AND LET ME KNOW WHEN THEY COME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THEN I'LL CARE! I'm not going to worry OMG WHAT IF THEY COME OVER HERE?! IMO THAT'S STUPID TO DO!! !! !! !

Yep, that instance sounds quite AS to me...

I understand your feeling about wanting to belong somewhere at long last. I felt the same when I first discovered Asperger's.

You don't have to have zero empathy like me to be AS. We all have different degrees of empathy, with successful salesmen at the top and Aspies at or near the bottom.

NTs describe the experience of empathy as "just knowing". Empathy is a kind of sixth sense that is inborn and develops through one's life, starting at around 3-4 years old. It cannot be learned because it's not a skill, it's a mental faculty. You can learn skills to try and compensate some for the lack of empathy, but the fact remains that Aspies can't intuitively figure another's state of mind. Due to this, Aspies don't develop an intuitive knowledge of what is appropriate or inappropriate in a group. The difficulty with smalltalk and socializing are just the tip of the iceberg. The root is in the lack of the mental faculty of empathy.

Hmmm, sounds like an "us vs them" topic. It probably just depends on the person & the situation. I feel this is just a little too simplistic to apply to any one situation. Just my opinion, btw.

It really depends on the person, especially considering some of the new research. Myself and my younger son are part of the group that feels and empathizes too much causing shutdowns. This is to the point of me recognizing some issues with other people before allistics do, even though I don't do eye contact. We are both officially diagnosed on the spectrum. My older son (broader autism phenotype for sure, has chosen not to go for a diagnosis because he doesn't care...) definitely has issues with empathy, but he's learning the social cues so that in many instances he can fake it even if he doesn't actually "get" it. For example, it was cold out and I was shivering. My younger son said he was cold. My older son then offered me his jacket (a complete shock to me at the time because such things don't come naturally to him). So it can be learned even if it doesn't come naturally, just like all the other social convention scripts.

Even though this thread is ten years old, I am choosing to comment on the lack of progress in understanding flawed theories on this topic, the very poor quality of the research the theories grew out of, and some observations made during my years here on WP.

The categories conventionally used to declaim affective empathy in AS people are simplistic, misleading and poorly supported because of methodological flaws in the theory- driven research that was later used to push this theory as if it were fact. It is heartening that the major proponent of this research has back pedalled in recent years, though this change in his thinking and earlier assertions has largely passed unnoticed.

There are AS people with an abundance of both kinds of empathy. There are others who show neither. I think it can be reasonable safely surmised that these two groups represent the two tails of the Bell Curve distribution. Those in between vary greatly. That's what I have learnt from direct observation of thousands of posts here over the years.

The percentage of AS men who seem to possess advanced empathetic abilities seems lower than the female percentage, and you find the same difference in NT populations.

The myths around empathy and AS have become cemented into belief systems, and they will only crumble away when sufficient numbers of concerned people apply critical thinking and careful evaluation of how the myths did develop, were promoted and became cemented into popular belief, then a challenge based in fact can take place to dispose of the blanket careless use of the false claims at long last.

Minorities suffer, and that leaves them vulnerable to absorbing destructive myths about themselves, which become part and parcel of internalised oppression. We see instances of this phenomenon every day here on Wrong Planet. That leads to lives lived in a sense of hopelessness and despair. I have a vision of a future freedom for those currently entrapped in these destructive myths, however long that may take to evolve.

It isn't that I don't have empathy, it's that I don't seem able to effectively express it to other people, especially when they need it the most.

Sometimes the starting point is to extend compassion to yourself, to acknowledge the impacts of "otherisation" and set yourself free first.

This will turn on whether one defines "empathy" as being able to read and figure out how a person is feeling from non-verbal indications, or as a synonym for "caring." If the definition of empathy is "caring" for others, then Aspies can be very good with that. Better, in some cases, than NT's. If the first definition applies, then a lot of us suck at it.

The problem is that the phrase "lack of empathy" has been redefined in popular culture to mean "avaricious," or even "sociopathic." Meanwhile, here we are considering the "technical" definition of empathy which will leave most NT's confused. The technical definition of the word probably couldn't interest them less.

When the press says a violent person is autistic and then links it to lacking "empathy," what it really means is that the writer wonders if autistic people are "sociopathic." Since the shrinks will usually say autistics are no more sociopathic than the general population if that much, this leads to that substitute code phrase, "lack of empathy." I'm not sure the general public knows what to think of Aspies. At one moment, they see a profile of an adolescent concert pianist, and in the next they see a person identified as a person "with Asperger's Syndrome" shoot up a school. I'm sure they're sometimes as confused by us as we are by them.

Energy spent on hairsplitting and redefining what kinds of empathy AS people "do and don't have" on AS forums is a waste of time and energy; the real issue is the institutionalised, mass media reinforced, stigmatisation that endlessly promotes the core myth that AS people as a total group lack capacity for any empathy at all.

Again it goes back to the original promoters of the myth, like Baron Cohen in his less enlightened days. So many AS people bought into that myth (he's an "expert", some said, "so he must be right") - though perhaps those of us more familiar from first hand experience of the ambition and chicanery that goes in the service of career building in academic psychology were marginal dissenting voices even then, especially those of us who took advanced papers in methodological error and Philosophy of Science, which endowed us with some insight into how these myths are created and disseminate.

When Baron Cohen began the relatively recent shift to a more balanced view of AS people - of which I personally believe he is one, in the closet - then there was a chance for AS voices to capitalise on that with a wider public voice. However this didn't happen. Instead, energy continued to be wasted repeating the mantra of "oh but at least we have cognitive empathy", a mantra that itself only serves to reinforce poorly based stigma and stereotypes.

The core thing that AS people lack, as a group, is not empathy; it's the general ability to strategise and advocate in effective ways with sufficient co-ordination to challenge the defaming myths and soundly refute them. Part of the reason may lie in the fact that so many drop out of university or don't specialise in disciplines that provide tools to recognise scientific myth-making nor understand how it becomes embedded belief disguised as objective scientific knowledge. However I don't want to seem critical of people for not knowing what they don't know. I am just very sad that they don't know.

To an extent, sadly, a large proportion of the AS community is as gullible to scientific chicanery as the general public is. Those who aren't so gullible tend to be unco-ordinated voices in the wilderness drowned out by the parroting of the entrenched dogma upon which Baron-Cohen built his career.