Empathy is not a feature of autism
Empathy is not a feature of autism.
Is it impacted by autistic brain wiring? Absolutely. But it's not a feature of autism. And I want to talk about this because this is one of the most common misconceptions I've seen about autism.
Yes, there are absolutely autistic people who have lower (or no) empathy. But that is not true for the majority of autistic people. Not according to the research.
Before I get into the research, it's important to note that the DSM (the most widely used diagnostic manual) does not mention the word empathy once in all 22 pages on autism.
That said...
According to the current research, most autistic people do have empathy, we just experience and communicate it *differently* than nonautistic people.
Earlier/older studies did find lower empathy in autistic participants, but that was before researchers figured out that there are different types of empathy. The main ones being cognitive and emotional empathy.
Cognitive empathy is when a person understands logically what another person is experiencing even when they haven't experienced it themselves.
Emotional empathy is when a person has gone through something similar and can relate emotionally to how the person who's going through it now might be feeling.
And the most current research has consistently shown that there is no universal autistic experience when it comes to empathy. Just that our version is different from the "typical" version.
Here are some recent findings that I think are particularly noteworthy.
One study from 2021 looked at empathy in autistic and nonautistic children. Not only did they NOT find that the autistic children had less empathy than their nonautistic peers... they found more SIMILARITIES than differences between the two groups.
(Study for reference... Quantity and Quality of Empathic Responding by Autistic and Non-Autistic Adolescent Girls and Boys... link below)
And in another recent study from 2024, the researchers found that autistic teens reported lower empathy on self assessments than their actual performance (meaning the autistic teens felt they had less empathy than they actually demonstrated)...
But an especially interesting finding was that their actual performance was *the same* as their nonautistic peers.
So there was no difference between the two groups when it came to performance of empathy.
And what I found particularly fascinating about this study was that the parents of the autistic teens rated them as less empathetic than the teens rated themselves. Meaning, the autistic teens felt they had more empathy than their parents did.
All of this to say... it's evident that there can be a significant mismatch between how much empathy people THINK an autistic person has, and how much empathy the autistic person ACTUALLY has.
(Study for reference... Empathy Among Autistic and Non-Autistic Adolescents: The Importance of Informant Effects... link below)
And in another study from 2024, researchers found that empathy can't be generalized at all for autistic people.
In other words, there’s a HUGE amount of variation across autistic individuals in how they experience empathy.
And the differences that exist have to do with how the empathy is EXPRESSED, not how it is EXPERIENCED.
(Study for reference... Establishing the Structure and Different Manifestations of Empathy in Autism Spectrum Disorder... link below)
So though some autistic people do have lower or no empathy... the research clearly demonstrates that this is far from a universal experience for autistic people.
I sincerely hope this helps 🙂
Links to research for reference...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39115741/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39016632/