Do Autistic People Have No Empathy?

[Hypnalis]

Along with leveraging the general uncertainty about what "empathy" means, there's some shady pseudo-logic in that claim too. And it can't be accidental - the writer is deliberately lying.

“Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) fail to develop empathy via mentalization (a Theory of Mind). They feel no guilt or embarrassment (they have no conscience). They avoid being shamed after they have transgressed.”

The empathy/theory of mind link is real, but the writer doesn't complete that thought because ....
... as a whole that statement is intended to establish empathy as being binary (you have it or you don't).

The writer doesn't want to say that openly, because people who know what empathy means also know it's continuous - you can have more or less of it on a continuous scale, with zero being rare. That leaves a large gap that corresponds with the real world: ASDs probably have an empathy deficit compared to NT's, but it doesn't

Once the "zero empathy" lie has been injected, the reader skips to the next section, and "learns":

Due to having zero empathy, all ASDs are without a conscience, cannot feel guilt or embarrassment, and don't feel any shame even when we know we've done something wrong.

So the implication is that we're all sociopaths, and can't be taught to mitigate or improve our behavior by normal methods.

I'm not going to watch that video because it woud probably make me angry ...
... but one general observation:
that quote could easily be used to create an argument justifying coercive conditioning (e.g. the dark locked rooms, limited food/water, kinetic discouragement style of "teaching").

Maybe the video doesn't actually go that far, but if it contains reasonable suggestions, why start by dehumanizing us (ASDs)?

BTW - the technique I described here is in common use at the moment. The culture war runs hot because of it.

The warning sign is the use of "all or nothing" words (easy to unwrap, but only if you can "see" them).
The indicator for a malicious actor is that the basis for the "binary" assertion is hidden: "fail to develop" + spreading the meaning of what isn't developed between "empathy" and "theory of mind", both of which are susceptible to being misunderstood by normies.

 

[Shamar]

I recently came across a video discussing both autistic people and empaths which discusses a study from 2023. In the video, the guy presenting it, a psychologist, says the following:

“Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) fail to develop empathy via mentalization (a Theory of Mind). They feel no guilt or embarrassment (they have no conscience). They avoid being shamed after they have transgressed.”

Is this an accurate assessment of us, or is it misleading?

Here is the video, and here is the study for anyone curious:

https://academic.oup.com/chidev/article/94/4/e181/8255250?login=false

It is not that we don't have empathy, but that we have trouble (or inability) expressing it. Did anyone consider that distress over a broken toy was empathy for the pain the toy was feeling? Admittedly, I was too offended by the video to watch it much past the introduction.

 

[the_tortoise]

Is this an accurate assessment of us, or is it misleading?

Misleading. Misinformative, prejudiced, garbage idea, in my opinion.

There is also very good research that does not at all support the idea autistics lack empathy...

Autistic people can lack empathy, just as NT people can. The only generalizable difference is we don't think the same way NTs do, so it is harder (if not impossible) for us to infer what they think and feel. (And it works both ways -- how much empathy and understanding does your average NT person have when it comes to uniquely autistic differences and difficulties?? From what I can tell: Little or none.)

Those autistics who cannot read nonverbal cues at all will miss a lot of information about feelings and inner state, but may be just as empathic (according to the better research out there, that controls for whether or not the autistic person has the information about another persons feelings or experience) as anyone else once told the information in a way they understand and via a processing medium their brain does better with -- such as verbal description, for example.

Many autistics also have alexythemia, and in that case one could argue that lack of empathy for others is not that at all, per se, as they would also lack it for themselves, in a manner of speaking...and really it is not a lack of empathy, it is a significant difficulty with recognizing and understanding emotions...that is a very different thing because it doesn't automatically mean a person doesn't care about others, doesn't have any interest in understanding or knowing about others, doesn't care how their behaviour affects others once tmit is explained clearly in a way they can understand. And alexythemia doesn't preclude having strong cognitive empathy and a lot of empathy for all aspects of experience beyond emotion.

A person like me lacks shame or embarrassment about a lot of NT causes of shame and embarrassment...I fail to see why it is bad or reflects poorly on someone to not know something, or not feel shame about something harmless but strange-seeming, for example. I feel remorse and regret snd a desire to make things right when I know I have hurt someone -- the key is "when I know"; I need a lot of information to understand the reasoning behind the feelings and fully appreciate the typical perspective -- that said, I do pick up on nonverbal cues -- for me the missing piece is usually more the "why" for feelings, that is a black box for me and I can miss all the hints I am expected to infer from people's non-explicit words and from social context (at least in real time); This doesn't mean I am incapable of feeling shame (although there is an argument to be made that shame is rarely a useful thing for anyone feel, too) nor that I don't care about the feelings of others, it means that my cognitive frameworks and mechanisms, perhaps many of my values also, differ from what's common so it takes more work both to understand others and to show that understanding and the empathy I do, in fact have a lot of capacity for, to said very different others. And again, this works both ways -- most non-autistic people have a very hard time reading me accurately and undestanding my thoughts and feelings (and likely most or all other autistic people, too, to varying degrees) so where are all the videos and flawed/biased poor quality/poorly designed/poorly thought out studies proclaiming how badly lacking in empathy they are???

It saddens me that people still believe this stuff.