Opinions on Simon Baron-Cohen's response to critics

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I think he's got it wrong--there are four elements to empathy.

1. Reception of information: Reading another person's state of mind.

2. Compassion: Wanting beneficial things for another person.

3. Emotional mirroring: Instinctive copying of emotions expressed by another person.

4. Expression: Communicating one's compassion to another person.

The cognitive/affective model is very much deficient because it does not take communication into account and does not differentiate desire to help from emotional mirroring.

There are some incorrect assumptions made that need to be corrected:

1. Reception of emotional information does not have to do with compassion, but with communication; it is, in fact, only peripherally related to empathy. Not being able to understand another person's emotions is unrelated to whether or not you care what they are feeling; mixing this into "empathy" confuses the issue. It is like accusing someone of not caring about their friend's recent bereavement because they were not informed of the loss and thus could not express their condolences.

2. Compassion does not need to be emotional. There is often--probably, usually--an emotional element; however, desire to help can be quite cerebral and dispassionate. In fact, some of the most compassionate people--doctors, paramedics, firemen, etc.--are specifically taught to keep their emotions out of the picture so that they can help more effectively. It is incorrect to assume an empathy deficit in an autistic person whose compassion is rational rather than emotional. If the person desires to help another person who he knows is in trouble, then whether or not he is emotionally moved, he is being altruistic--that is, compassionate.

3. Emotional mirroring has been shown to be less likely among autistics watching NT emotional expression. This phenomenon probably helps NT children learn compassion because if an NT child witnesses someone else being hurt, they will feel an echo of the pain themselves. Emotional mirroring forces them to learn compassion. That autistic children mimic emotions to a lesser degree is not necessarily indicative of a lesser degree of compassion, however, because without that constant flood of emotions from other people, autistic people do not become used to functioning in the presence of others' distress. This effectively means that it is difficult for an autistic person to understand that someone else is feeling distress, but because they are not used to it, others' distress tends to affect them to a greater degree once they understand. There is also much less need to actually witness suffering for an autistic person to feel compassion; merely hearing about it is enough.

4. Expression of compassion is often the NT measure of empathy because in the NT world it is assumed that one will be able to read and understand another's emotions instinctively. Under this assumption, empathy can be measured by simply looking at whether or not the person who witnesses another's distress responds to it in a pro-social way. This idea that "if you don't respond, you don't care," has been taken for granted to the point that it is being used as a measure of empathy in experiments--but these experiments can only be valid if it can be established that the information about the other person's state of mind and experiences has reached the observer. In most cases, that is not tested. Autism is a disorder that affects communication--including communication of sympathy and desire for another person's well-being. Assuming that an autistic person is not compassionate because he does not express sympathy is like assuming that a paraplegic is not polite because he does not stand to greet a visitor.

yes, just like we do. and callista, i liked your post, but i disagree, i don't think it needs to be so complicated. i think SBC has got it right.

An idea should be as simple as possible--but no simpler. And I think SBC's idea is too simple.

He doesn't take into account that the cognitive component--understanding and responding--has two elements, one based on expressive communication and the other on receptive communication. It's easy to have problems with one, both, or neither; they are different things, cognitively.

He also doesn't consider that empathy need not be emotional. If he calls everything but the communication part of it "affective", then he is completely ignoring an autistic person's rational understanding of others' emotions. He's got theory-of-mind squished together with emotional mirroring; and that's not a good model because it is absolutely possible (and for autistics more likely than not) to have theory of mind without emotional mirroring.

It's like he's taking these completely unrelated cognitive functions and calling them all one thing. It just doesn't make sense to me to group them that way.

While I didn't really find Borat to be that funny, Bruno was hillarious.

I think that Callista is right. The more simplistic model leads to things like SBC saying in his new book on evil that autistic people formulate rigid moral codes without accounting for the fact that many of us actually find it pretty awful to hurt people, and not just whatever sterile reasoning he attributes to us.

i agree with what you're saying about cognitive having two elements, both receiving and sending. that makes total sense. however do we really need to break them into 2 parts? why? and if we have affective empathy, we'll send cognitive empathy correctly anyways

for the second part about empathy being emotional -- i think thats the basis of empathy. so i'd disagree with that part.

I think we need to break them into two parts because it's possible to have problems with one, but not with the other; in fact, it's pretty likely.

For example: There are some autistics who are so sensitive to others' feelings that they withdraw from people for that reason. But they don't know how to react, how to comfort that person. On the other hand, some people have no clue that someone is upset unless they are directly told; but once they do know, they will instinctively try to respond in a comforting way.

It has a pretty obvious parallel to the difference between receptive and expressive language--two things which are often disconnected for autistics, too. Plenty of us can understand more than we can speak; others can follow verbal patterns, but not truly understand how to use language for communication. Communication of emotions can pose the same problems as language, and I think it's important to separate receptive and expressive emotional communication just like we separate verbal communication into receptive and expressive.

Again I would like to reinforce that empathy does not need to be emotional. For some people it is primarily emotional. For me, it is not--despite my tendency toward a high degree of altruism.

When I experience empathy, it is primarily rational. For example, when I learned about the earthquake in Japan, I responded by learning more about earthquakes and more about nuclear power and the dangers involved in a meltdown. I shared my knowledge of radiation with people on an online forum. I studied the culture of Japan and watched how the people were coping. I set a small amount of money to help with disaster relief; even though I knew it wasn't much, I knew that many people like me were also giving small amounts. Some time later, I joined the Red Cross as a local disaster relief volunteer. There wasn't a lot of strong emotion involved; it was more like: "These people are in trouble. I wish I could help; but I cannot. So I will watch and learn, and when I find an opportunity, I will help." It's not a strong emotional response--I've responded more strongly to a sad event in a book's storyline. It's simply a knowledge that people are suffering, and a desire to help--maybe out of a sense of justice or rightness or knowing that I have time that will go to waste if I don't use it for something useful.

I know there are a lot of people who are like that, who will respond to distress in others by analyzing and trying to fix the problem, who are guided not by the way others' distress bothers them but by a wish to live in a just world. They are two completely different styles and neither is superior to the other. The existence of a rational style of empathy means that the strength of the emotional reaction does not predict the level of empathic response.

Simon Baron Cohen's theory of mind has a few flaws

The problem is some children with Autism can learn readily, prioritizes behavior, and don’t always take an egocentric perspective in relation to not understanding the following scenario;
– Child asked to observe Sally & Anne
– Sally puts her ball in the basket
– Sally then leaves the room
– Ann moves the ball to her box
– When Sally returns, where will she look for the
ball.

According to Baron Cohen, autistic kids are delayed up to 7 years of age to learn to search for the ball in Ann's box. I observed my daughter figure this one out by 2.5 years old.

Do cats have AS?

I still don't get the above scenario. If you leave, you assume that your ball will still be where you left it, when it's not, you check elsewhere. What does it have to do with ToM? Do NTs naturally assume that because they leave someone alone with their possessions that they will move it and thus check the box immediately or what? So confusing.

Before you guys start accusing NTs. All autistics are different and often times, we dont know each other in real life.

So can autistics read the body language of other autistics correctly. If this is a no, you cant blame NTs.

First: Your response is confusing - what do you mean "accusing NTs?" I said that NTs often get it wrong in my experience (that is, interacting with me), but that's not an accusation. That's a factual statement.

And as far as it goes, my therapist told me once that she found me very hard to read, and more recently she said that I don't think like other people and it's difficult for her to guess what works for me and what doesn't. 20 years ago, my ex once pushed me and pushed me and pushed me until I finally yelled back at her at which point she said "so you are human after all" and said that she can't tell what I am thinking or feeling. I have had people tell me that my body language and facial expressions tell them I am lying when I am in fact telling the blunt, honest truth. I have had people tell me that they can tell I am hiding something because I don't make eye contact. I have been told so many things about my so-called "real" or "ulterior" motives by NTs that I have to conclude: NTs can't read my facial expressions or body language very well.

That's not blame or an accusation, that's simply what I have observed.

And some autistics can read some other autistics' body language. There's been discussion of this in the past.

Several years ago I lived in a large household with several other people. Some of the people in the household had a couple of friends who'd come over to do things, and they had two children. I helped take care of the children sometimes when everyone else was busy. ANYway, one of the children had no diagnosis and a tendency to monologue at length about her favorite cartoon. She knew everything. Anyway, I got along with her fairly well, although her monologues could get fairly overloading.

The other child was nonverbal and diagnosed as autistic. I believe he was about 4 or 5 years old. He and I got along in a way that he got along with no one else who wasn't in his immediate family. As his father said, he'd never seen him take to anyone so quickly. Neither of us interacted in a manner typical for NTs. I had no expectations of things NTs might want from him (like talking, or hugs, or other interactions like that) but he'd show me things and basically stay near me. I can't say here and now whether he or I read the other's body language or that any interactions we had were effortless, but I have never experienced that kind of thing with an NT before or since.

At the time I did not know I was autistic. I didn't think there was anything particularly special about the interaction because I had no expectations of what an autistic child should be like - I didn't think of him (or perceive him) as being trapped in his own world, or think that his lack of speech meant he was deficient. I just thought he was an interesting child, and I tend to get along with children in general. It wasn't until his father said that he never takes to people like he took to me that I wondered about it, although I didn't have anything resembling an answer until this past year.

Simon baron Cohen refers to this as "mind blindness" where autistic people (in his theory) don't understand the mental states of others. So in the case of the ball in the box the autistic child (Anne) doesn't think Sally could have hidden the ball in Sally's box because she doesn't consider Sally in the scenario. Anne is focused on the ball and where she put it (in her basket).

Although my daughter is autistic she figured this trick out early (around 2.5) so I am not convinced the theory can be generalized to all autistic people.

80% of the autistic children who were given these tests in the original research failed the theory of mind test, which makes it questionable as a "core deficit" of autism.

I commented it's likely that not all autistic people have that deficit, and someone seemed to extrapolate that into "fully capable of social interactions" which I didn't get, as I never said anything that would lead to that, but said poster later decided to try to have a social experiment with me instead of a conversation.

In addition the the mind blindness test was "normed" with a largely male cohort. The latest research suggests autism diagnosis for females needs to be changed from the current DMSIV.

It's amazing that SBC is just now talking about the need to do research with autistic women and girls, after two decades (at least) of doing research with primarily or only boys. He says it's a flaw in the system but somehow avoids mentioning how much he participated in that system.