Dear John,

This statement is just wrong – absence of empathy is a characteristic of psychopaths and/or narcissists, not autistic people!

But there’s a surprising number of people who believe it anyway. And even today, I still regularly come across people using “autistic” or “on the spectrum” as a term of abuse for people who are being awkward. Maybe sometimes it’s true. But frequently it isn’t.

So why do people believe it?

I know you can do empathy. But empathy is about sharing others’ emotions, and some people communicate their emotions largely through channels that you don’t pick up too easily. That means that in some cases you aren’t going to recognise their emotions as quickly as others would, and even when you do, you might not communicate that in the way that they expect. So if someone meets an autistic person when they want an emotional response, they might come to the conclusion that the person is incapable of such a response. And then they might tell others that autistic folk are “incapable of empathy” or some such rubbish. [Of course, there are other cases where you’d pick up on emotions quicker, especially if they are expressed in a way that you’re more used to.]

The more sophisticated version of the same lie is saying that autism is caused by a defective Theory of Mind – “the ability to interpret others’ beliefs, intentions and emotions”. (It’s not a theory in the usual scientific sense, like the Theory of Evolution or the Theory of Relativity – it’s an unhelpful label for a cognitive ability. It obviously wasn’t labelled by an autistic person because they’d have done a better job.) Defective Theory of Mind used to be one of the main proposed explanations for autism. The main problem with this is that it isn’t true. As Grant Macaskill writes: Similarly, to say that a person with autism has no theory of mind is potentially offensive and misleading: it implies that they do not recognize the presence of a neurological state in another person that is different than that in themselves. In truth, however, autistic people do recognize this. They simply need different means to actually understand that state than the intuitive ones that others enjoy. Ironically, those who claim that autistic people lack empathy or Theory of Mind demonstrate by their claim that they themselves lack both empathy and ToM when it comes to relating to autistic people!

It is worth recognising the truth behind the lie though. You can come across as having little or no empathy, simply because you don’t naturally pay attention to the way that other people communicate their emotions, and you often don’t express yours in a way that they notice either. Those are useful skills to learn!

All the best,

Future John