I want to thank Simon Baron-Cohen for taking the time to respond, in his September 10th post on the Autism Blogs Directory, to one of my early pieces on autism and empathy. I am very gratified that he did so.
Unfortunately, I found his response quite troubling. While there are a number of points that concern me, I’m going to focus on the aspects of his piece that speak directly to the most pressing issues.
The problematic nature of the test instruments
My first concern is that while Simon points to studies proving empathy and theory of mind deficits in autism, he does not address any of the many valid critiques of the test instruments themselves. For example, he chose to respond to a piece on the Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) theory that I wrote over two years ago, when I was newly diagnosed and at the very beginning of formulating my thinking on the issue, rather than speaking to my recent systematic critique of the numerous flaws and biases in the Empathy Quotient (EQ) test or to my earlier piece on the Theory of Mind test. Both critiques discuss serious problems with the primary assessment tools on which his conclusions are based. If he would like his work to be better informed by the ways in which autistic people experience our sensory and emotional lives, and by the ways in which the test instruments fail to take account of the complexity of our experiences, I invite him to read both pieces, along with numerous other critiques and personal accounts on the Autism and Empathy website.
Simon also fails to mention that the false belief test used for the past 30 years to assess theory of mind in autistic children relies upon verbal interaction and language processing, areas in which autistic people are understood to have serious difficulties. In fact, in a 2005 paper, Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Jennifer L. Frymiare point out that the syntactic form of the questions posed by the test is one of the most complex in the English language. The authors go on to cite a study showing that performance on false belief tests correlates with language ability in children with and without autism. In fact, when autistic and deaf children are given a false belief test administered visually rather than verbally, they score higher than non-autistic hearing children: “If one creates a false drawing task that tests theory of mind without reliance on language, one finds that children with autism and children with deafness actually outperform children with normal hearing (Peterson, 2002).”
The misleading nature of the term “cognitive empathy”
My issues with Simon’s work go far beyond the problematic methodology of the test instruments, however, and extend to his use of the term “cognitive empathy” to describe an inability to read and to interpret nonverbal signals. If, as Simon asserts, “people with autism are very capable of an empathic response” when those around us verbalize (or otherwise make clear) their feelings, then our difficulties lie not in the area of “affective empathy,” but in the area of what he calls “cognitive empathy.” By this reasoning, Simon’s theory of autism as an empathy disorder rests on the latter term.
To make clear the misleading nature of the term “cognitive empathy,” a brief summary of Simon’s definitions is in order.
In The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, and Normal Sex Differences, Simon and his colleague Sally Wheelwright draw on a definition of cognitive empathy as “using a ‘theory of mind’ (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988; Wellman, 1990) or ‘mindreading’ (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Whiten, 1991).” In Theory of mind in normal development and autism, Simon defines the term “theory of mind” and specifically describes it as a core component of humanity that is impaired in autistic people:
A theory of mind remains one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human (Whiten, 1993). By theory of mind we mean being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action. In brief, having a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s minds. Difficulty in understanding other minds is a core cognitive feature of autism spectrum conditions. The theory of mind difficulties seem to be universal among such individuals.” (Baron-Cohen, 3)
In his response to my post, and in numerous other pieces of writing, Simon asserts that both theory of mind and cognitive empathy rely upon an ability to see and to read nonverbal signals. If a person can’t do so, but relies upon verbal language or another form of communication, then that person has an impairment in theory of mind and in the cognitive empathy that depends upon it, resulting in a deficit in “one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human.”
It’s my contention that calling a physical inability to see and to interpret nonverbal signals a failure of any kind of empathy is to make an unmerited interpretive leap. After all, people who are blind cannot see and interpret nonverbal signals — they rely upon spoken language and/or Braille text — and yet, to my knowledge, no one has alleged that blindness is a low-empathy condition. Blind people come to understand the mental states of other people through other means, just as autistic people do. And yet, for an autistic person, a problem seeing and interpreting visual phenomena — and the necessity of taking alternative routes to acquiring the information expressed by such phenomena — is the basis for defining autism as an empathy disorder.
Please note the double standard at work.
Making a processing disability an empathy disability
When it comes to reading nonverbals, some sighted autistic people report not being able to see the signals at all. Others, like myself, receive a great deal of information from the eyes and face, but cannot parse the signals separately or intuitively. Perhaps we are really talking about the same thing here; after all, if I can’t separate the signals, the net effect is that I can’t see them as signals in the normal sense of the word. In any case, in my own experience, the problem is that all of the information from the eyes and face comes in very quickly. And while I cannot translate any of the more subtle nonverbals and use them in real time, my affective empathic response is quite acute. So, while I always understand that something is up, I may not always be able to discern exactly what it is at that very moment.
My visual processing of nonverbal signals is exactly analogous to my auditory processing of verbal speech: if you put me in a sound-rich environment, in which multiple conversations are going on at once, I can physically hear the sounds and the vocal tones, but I cannot separate the words from one another in order to understand and respond to them. The message becomes garbled.
No one has ever suggested that, because of my difficulties with auditory processing, being unable to understand what someone says to me verbally in a noisy room is evidence of low empathy. But when, because of my difficulties with visual processing, I can’t understand what someone says to me nonverbally, it’s adduced as prima facie evidence of a condition defined by low empathy.
That is a most illogical and unscientific conclusion.
If I cannot see nonverbal signals or parse them in real time, that is the sign of a visual processing issue, not the sign of an empathy disorder.
If I have to devote nearly every ounce of processing energy I have to decoding the words someone says to me, and therefore cannot afford to divert it for receiving visual information from the person’s eyes and face, that is the sign of an auditory processing issue, not the sign of an empathy disorder.
If, when I go to the market, I cannot stop and ask after people’s welfare because I have to focus on getting my shopping done before the sensory overload becomes disorienting and painful, that is the sign of a sensory processing issue, not the sign of an empathy disorder.
And if, when bombarded by sensory and emotional information, I find myself unable to express my empathy in real time and respond in any kind of conventional way, that is the sign of an information processing and communication issue, not the sign of an empathy disorder.
To define any of these issues as the signs of an empathy disorder is to take a physical disability and raise it to the level of a failure of humanity.
Hurt feelings, oversimplifications, and The Science of Evil
Suffering is nearly always the consequence of ascribing an inborn dearth of humanity to any child born to two human parents. And this is why any assertion that autistic people are born with a deficit in a core component of humanity is so terribly, terribly troubling to me.
I’m not talking about someone hurting my feelings, as Simon implies. What I’m concerned about are ill-conceived definitions and unwarranted conclusions that have the potential to cause tremendous suffering for autistic people at the hands of the larger world.
So, when Simon takes processing and communication difficulties and makes them evidence of an empathy disorder, then I have a problem.
And when, in a post for the Autism Blogs Directory, his words do not reflect the manner in which he describes our capacity for affective empathy in his latest book, my concerns only increase.
Consider the following: In his September 10th post, he provides a chart to explain the way that he profiles autistics and psychopaths in his recently published popular science book The Science of Evil (entitled Zero Degrees of Empathy in the UK). The chart in his blog post shows psychopaths and autistics with profiles that are a mirror-image of each other: psychopaths are positive for cognitive empathy but negative for affective empathy (they can intuitively read how people are feeling, but they don’t care), while autistics are negative for cognitive empathy and positive for affective empathy (we can’t intuitively read how people are feeling, but once we understand that a person is upset, we’re upset, too).
However, the information on this chart does not accurately represent the autistic profile that Simon delineates in The Science of Evil. For example, in a matrix in the latter part of the book, one finds that the profiles of psychopaths and autistics are not mirror images of each other; psychopaths show the same profile as in the blog post, but the autistic profile is negative for both cognitive and affective empathy (Table 1: Distinct Profiles of the Empathy Disorders, 154).
In fact, in contrast to his statement in his post that “people with autism are very capable of an empathic response,” The Science of Evil is relentless in its portrayal of the autistic capacity for affective empathy as highly impaired. In order to illustrate the nature of Asperger’s Syndrome, for example, Simon introduces a 52-year-old adult named Michael, whose dream “is to live in a world without people, where he can have total control.” Michael not only fails to read nonverbal signals, but “does not know how to respond to someone else’s feelings,” even when they are explicit (99).
The book does not differentiate between Michael not knowing what to do and not having an affective response at all.
The book does not explore the possibility that Michael may have long since shut down his emotional responses because of severe empathic and sensory overload, fear, anxiety, shunning, loneliness, bullying, despair, and other life experiences common to autistic people.
The book does not explore the possibility that Michael dreams of being alone because he seeks to comfort himself, in the midst of acute difficulties to which the world is largely oblivious, with a fantasy of control.
The book does not explore the possibility that Michael systemizes to an extreme degree in order to exert control over an extreme intensity of empathic and sensory experience.
And the book does not provide the story of Michael as only one example of the complexity of response among autistic people. It presents Michael as representative. Nowhere does Simon narrate any scenario in which any autistic person shows any affective empathic response to the feelings of another person. In fact, he does the following:
1. He asserts, without qualification of any kind, that for people with Asperger’s and people with classic autism, “Other people’s behavior is beyond comprehension, and empathy is impossible,” placing us all on the zero end of the empathy scale (117).
2. He then attempts to redeem autistic people as “Zero-Positive” (rather than “Zero-Negative,” which is reserved for psychopaths) because our “empathy difficulties” are associated with “having a brain that processes information in ways that can lead to talent” (citing the work of the savants Daniel Tammett, Derek Paravicini, and Peter Myers), and because “Zero-Positive” individuals are responsible for innovations in technology, science, mathematics, and other “systemizing” fields (96, 106-107, 122). Of course, he thereby leaves out the vast majority of autistic people who have no savant gifts and no special talent for innovation in any field at all. Hundreds of thousands of us therefore lose the already dubiously redemptive “Positive” label.
3. He goes to great lengths to insist that people with Asperger’s develop a moral code not because we are informed by an empathic response to others, but only out of a drive to systemize. When others act unethically, he writes, people with Asperger’s leap to the defense of the injured party — not because we are moved by empathy for the other person, but because unethical behavior “violates the moral system” we have “constructed through brute logic alone” (emphasis mine) (123). In other words, we’re simply upset that the rules have been broken.
Of course, this explanation rather begs the question of why anyone without an empathic response to the difficulties of other people would construct a moral code in the first place.
4. He characterizes people with classic autism as viewing their parents as “nothing more than a vending machine” to serve their desires. He thereby places people with classic autism outside the field of both empathic and ethical response, calling them “Morality-Negative” (119, 154).
And then he asserts in a post on the Autism Blogs Directory, four months after the publication of his book, that people with autism are, in fact, “very capable of an empathic response” — an assertion that appears nowhere, explicitly or implicitly, in the pages of The Science of Evil, published on two continents, and reviewed by critics the world over.
When someone writes a popular science book that will be read by far more people than any post on any blog, and in that book fails to address the depth and complexity of autistic experience, then we have a number of potential problems on our hands.
This is not about anyone hurting my feelings. It’s about the perpetuation of stereotypes and oversimplifications that, in my opinion, have the potential for tremendous harm. Consider the possibilities:
Autistic people describe our empathic experiences in detail, only to be told that we have such low empathy that we are the last to know it.
Autistic people protest abuse and ill-treatment, only to be told that we can’t understand other people’s motives and intentions, much less respond to them appropriately.
Autistic people are treated without empathy because other people believe that we have none ourselves.
Autistic people face lives of substandard care, isolation, and abuse because we are considered to have been born without a core component of humanity.
Autistic people lose opportunities for love, for friendship, and for caregiving work because people believe that we are incapable of them.
Autistic people lose our sense of who we are because we have to endure a constant and unrelenting barrage of messages that tell us that we are something else.
No, this is not about hurt feelings. It’s about the lives of people with classic autism. It’s about the lives of people with Asperger’s. It’s about the lives of people all along the spectrum. And it’s about the vulnerability, the rights, and the potential suffering of hundreds of thousands of living, breathing, fully human beings.
© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Thank you, for such a wonderful and touching article, I cant understand why a supposed man of science would ignore science so blatantly, and on top of that, the irony that he shows no empathy towards those he claims have no empathy…
Thank you so much for this, Rachel. I too found Baron-Cohen’s response disingenuous, and you have beautifully explained why.
I also noted that when he was addressing you directly, he didn’t pull out his “autistic people don’t know that they lack empathy because they also lack self-awareness” argument, which he did when being questioned by a non-autistic person.
Honestly it seems that he believes we lack empathy entirely but doesn’t have the courage to say it directly to us.
That’s the same impression I’ve always gotten from him, too, plus a bonus of “but YOU aren’t like that” derailing (http://derailingfordummies.com/#different). We are only Not Like That if we protest and can call him out online.
My take on this is that Baron-Cohen’s theories are misguided at best, and invalidated at worst, because he is conflating, whether through habit, ignorance, or bloody-mindedness, three aspects of Empathy: Input (Cognitive), Processing (Affective), and Output (what I call Demonstrative).
He (and I have to say that from what I’ve read, it’s not just him) explicitly conflates Affective with Demonstrative. Our internal experience is irrelevant if he can’t see it and measure it. It doesn’t matter how strongly we feel emotion, if our expression of it is not “correct”.
I go into more detail here: http://catsidhe.livejournal.com/174086.html.
And as an example of the damage he’s doing by encouraging the conflation of Empathy deficit (by a very reductionist model) with psychopathy, see http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/life/bad-to-the-bone-20110920-1kifx.html
That article begins by describing what could very well be an autistic child, under the subheading “Are some children just born evil?”.
I really liked this post, it touches the necessary points of the most important things that were wrong in his reply.
Such a powerful and persuasive post. You have deepened my own understanding of the issues and the deeper truths. Thank you many times over for your passion and the time you put into this topic.
A very strongly-argued post: I agree with you completely. You’ve echoed my own opinions about the shortcomings of the EQ and associated tests, and I also have deep concerns about the negative effects of such fallacies perpetuated through popular science writing. I often hear misconceptions about ASD from people that they have received from such sources.
One of the dangers is that because people on the spectrum often have difficulty expressing their feelings in whatever way it is easy for people on the outside to assume that such feelings are absent. And as you say, that makes it easier for those people to treat us as if we have none.
Hi Rachel, I really agree and appreciate your letter and your reply. I think Baron-Cohen is a great scientist actually and I have real problem seeing how he can think something stupid like that. it was always a riddle in my head. But yes it’s really misleading.
Me, my wife and my children, we are all aspie and actually, expecially in my wife and my daughter, if anything, I really see too much empathy (and yes, both me and my wife are physicist and for Baron-Cohen scorn we are also taking a second degree in psychology…).
I’m going to write a scientific essay contrasting Baron Cohen idea, I’ve by now a large amount of data. Do you like to review it (I’m italian, and I need a better english)? We can pubblish it together if you want.
Very good Rachel, you have articulated exactly what i felt was wrong with SBC’s reply to you. I am going to post a link to this on my FB page, for more people to read.
[...] An extremely well written article taking apart the assumptions made by Simon-Baron-Cohen in his book on autistic people and psychopaths (“Zero Degrees of Empathy” or “The Science of Evil”, depending on where it’s published). Isn’t it comforting to have this guy as one of the leading professional voices on your mindstate? [...]
SBC needs to get out more often. Of course talking to adults on the spectrum is a novel concept.! But, He also needs to talk to other specialists like developmental optometrists, PTs, OTs, and audiologists. Developmental optometrists would tell him that studies of eye disease and autism show rates of strabismus (eyes turned in/outwards) range from 20-80%. They have found correcting the eye problems dramatically changes a person’s sociability and personality. Strabismus is eminently treatable for most people.
Diftto that for APD although APD is less treatable.
I have done a lot of therapy for vision,hearing, motor skill problems, and timing. These therapies have helped me relate to other people much better….like duh, I can see, hear, or participate in activities better. I have a friend with wonderfully expressive eyes that I can interact with now that I am not focusing on her mouth as she talks.
Am I recommending everyone on the spectrum go out and do what I have done? I don’t know. What I have done takes enormous effort, access to experts within a speciality, is exhausting and takes tens of thousands of dollars in out of pocket expenses despite one of the best private insurance plans available.
Also, this is a spectrum disorder. What works for some of us will not work for all. In order to tease this out, At a minimum, I wish SBC would control for different known comorbidities within ASD .
The more I think about it, the less I like the idea of cognitive empathy being considered empathy at all. It is a skill. Autistics aren’t adept at it, but we can learn to be better at it. Psychopaths can’t learn to be better at affective empathy, because it’s more of an inherent trait–they already know how other people feel, they just don’t care beyond how it fits into their own agendas. Nor do they even need it–their skill at cognitive empathy allows them to fake affective empathy quite well.
Anyone have an idea for a new term for cognitive empathy?
Thank you! I agree completely that this is a social skill we’re talking about.
Sometimes it feels as though we’re fighting a battle on the wrong grounds, but I understand, despite my lack of humanity, that we have to pick our battles at times. Just because regular people learn this skill very young, and have a greater aptitude for it, to the point where it becomes unconscious, doesn’t mean it’s not learned.
Link to article about studies on strabismus and autism
http://www.autism.com/ARI/newsletter/133/page6.pdf
If you can’t see what’s happening, its much harder to be empathetic!
If your eyes don’t focus properly, you will have a blank or distracted look on your face…hardly an empathetic look. Hardly empathetic looking.
My vision therapists counsel parents all the time on the impact of visual problems on personality.
Well written. As for standing up for the underdog, in this case ourselves, it is definitely not about keeping rules, but to speak out against injustice. The only one I see lacking empathy is SBC.
Thanks for spending so much time and energy right now to focus on this. I understand what you’re writing about, and feel pretty much the same way about it, but have much more difficulties articulating it. I hope the others who read your posts realize what a talent this is, and how much energy these analytical/creative projects require.
Also, I was a little pissed off that SBC seemed to make a minor issue of the fact that you were hurt. I didn’t take the time to look up whether you referred to yourself in this way, but felt it was beside the point. Are non-autistic people not hurt when their humanity is questioned?
Well argued, Rachel, I agree with all you have said there.
I too have great doubts about this Systemising/Emppathatic dichotemy. Why are they mutually exclusive? I am very Empathic 62 on the EQ test, yet my working strength is and has always been my Logic (systemising?)
I feel that I am strong in both areas! And that neither affects the other.
It is yet another example of ‘pseudo science’ – where so called scientists espouse a theory and set out to prove it; not in a scientific way but by conducting some so called research that gives them the answer they want.
I would love to see SBC and co. conducting ALL the necessary control tests to eliminate EVERY possible other factor before drawing conclusions.
And there are an enormous number of factors, a few of which others have highlighted.
Science is NOT about proving one’s theory is right; no, it is about showing that your theory cannot be proven wrong! And the modern ‘pseudo science’ doesn’t do that.
PS. Hope you are feeling better.
Another Thought.
What is BJC blathering about with his ‘Sally Anne’ test?
Surely he has it all ‘arse about face’?
The autistic subjects were somewhat older and what they saw were two plastic dolls. Creatures they knew nothing about.
One put the marble in her box, went away and the other moved it.
This was the only information they had on which to base any assumptions about the ‘thought processes’ of plastic dolls.
And they saw that as soon as one left the other took her marble.
Therefore their only evidence as to what a plastic doll would do, is what they saw one do – take the marble.
Surely it is therefore logical (theory of mind) for them to assume that the one who went away would presume that that is exactly what the other would do.
They have an excellent ‘theory of mind’ derived from what they saw!
Always good, Rachel. Sadly, SBC is highly unlikely to respond again. He really oughtn’t be allowed to conduct any research at all and be relegated to pseudoscience.
I disagree most strongly. Calling for someone to be banned from research must be reserved for the worst examples of misconduct: those who ran the Tuskagee Syphilis experiments, for example, or Andrew Wakefield.
We cannot allow people’s research to be shut down just because we disagree with its methodology (assuming that it’s not outright criminal or malevolent) or results.
We can — we must — however, make our objections to it clear. If we disagree with his methodology, we have a duty to explain what it is we have a problem with, and challenge him to give a satisfactory response. If we have a problem with his conclusions, we have a duty to explain where we think his mistakes are, and how to correct them.
He has not done anything which would call for being banned from research — of which I am aware, anyway — no matter how strongly we disagree with him.
If we are to make a difference, if we are to be taken seriously and have an effect, we must make our claims to his research, and not to the man.
I agree with Catsidhe, but I also think that we should loudly protest what Simon chooses to research in the first place. Questioning whether we lack a quintessential element of humanity puts us in the position of a man who is asked to prove that he doesn’t beat his wife.
I also think we should speak up loudly over the fact that, with only a very few exceptions, the professional community hasn’t questioned the subject matter of his research or his conclusions, and that the general public seems to believe that a series of brain scans (explained in his latest book) could say more about us than we can say about ourselves. That’s just as worrisome to me as anything Simon might say. People can say what they want; the ensuing silence is where fear is born.
Rachel, you are absolutely right. I found his response to be very evasive. He chose a very select few points to respond to and ignored some of your strongest, most recent arguments. I also find it disingenuous of him to claim “the science agrees with him” without addressing the methodology and testability of his research. It was also belittling to dismiss concerns by autistic people as “having their feelings hurt.” I will always work to dispell the myth that people with autism lack empathy, and I will continue to try to encourage him to be honest about his research.
[...] Unwarranted Conclusions and the Potential for Harm: My Reply to Simon Baron-Cohen appears here by permission. [...]
Rachel, this response is beyond awesome. Having tired myself out yesterday at TPGTA, I have nothing to add.
GO MOM! This is, as usual, amazingly eloquent and articulate. And a great rebuttal to all the fallacies in SBC’s work.
You do a great takedown of SBC’s theories. I might add that he also seems to confuse empathy with the social “masks” that people learn to wear from the time they are toddlers.
I’ve noticed throughout my life dealing with NTs that they would have a seemingly empathic persona for when they socialized with each other. But when it came to interacting with me, they completely dropped that facade and unleashed all the cruelty their social face was hiding. They apparently didn’t feel I was worth the trouble of keeping up a social mask since, to them, I wasn’t “human” enough.
I notice they always reserve the worst treatment for anyone they perceive as being on the lower end of the social hierarchy. So it seems that “empathy” they’re supposedly born with is actually quite selective. Hmmm….
Thank you all for your thought-provoking and supportive comments. I’m a bit under the weather and can’t respond to each one separately, but I want to let you know that you’ve been heard, loud and clear, and that I appreciate your participation in this discussion.
I hope you feel better soon, Rachel.
I have been waiting to see what you’d write in response ever since I read SBC’s reply. I like what you wrote here a lot, and I hope these arguments gain traction.
Thank you, Lisa.
Your poignant views, Rachel, helped me to clarify that when one attempts to “pidgeon hole” others, using the dualistic mindset of “us” & “them”, very often the ‘humanness’ of those we wish to understand more is totally lost behind the business of medicalization and prognoses.
Well said, Alan. It’s the “us” and “them” mindset that causes so many problems. It’s always felt very clear to me that with human beings — and all living creatures — it really ought to be about “us.”
Sorry I haven’t been visiting lately, Rachel. I read your post the day you put it up on Facebook, but I have been far too exhausted dealing with the whole empathy and theory of mind issue in real life practise to have anything worthy to contribute here. I am beginning to suspect that we (i.e. us vs other) are talking at cross purposes, perhaps there are different empathy systems and different theories of mind… I am not only autistic, I also have an invisible silent painful illness, and after 46years of it, I can tell you that neurotypicals are NOT at all empathic to anything that is alien or different from them, and this includes unusual illnesses and pain that they have never experienced in their lifetime and probably never will.
And it’s a big job trying to pull them together to reach constructive and positive understanding between and from both sides of the same human coin? I don’t know, I am not much of a ‘scientist’. Thanks for the great work you are doing. People like me who have the passion for this subject but just no energy nor good enough ability are indebted to you for your dedication to the cause.
Thank you for your support, SP. Always much appreciated.
Hi,
thanks for this great post. This “science” destroyed my life, the one I loved found out that I can’t do eye contact, and thus I probably have AS. The result was, that she thought and told others that I am an unempathetic psychopath, and got someone else.
thanks you very much for your work,
you seem to be the best resource on the web besides wrongplanet
anton block
[...] Rachel’s post here she critiques the reply of Simon Baron-Cohen and his work further. Rachel additionally has valid [...]