Autistic people don’t lack empathy. But a lot of people mistakenly think we do, so I’m going to explain why it isn’t true.

First, I’ll start by saying that autistic people CAN lack empathy. It’s just not because of their autism. 

The diagnostic criteria for autism doesn’t mention empathy at all. Unlike the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, where lacking empathy is included in the definition itself. (Please note that I am not saying either is good or bad, just discussing how the conditions are defined.)

So... why do so many people think autistic people lack empathy?

Well, for a few reasons...

In 2004, Simon Baron-Cohen, a clinical psychologist in the UK, published his Empathy Quotient questionnaire to be used as a measure in an Asperger’s evaluation (which is what it was called at the time).

His questionnaire has since become widely used in autism testing and is still used till this day.

The problem with this measure though... is that there’s a barrier for many autistic people when it comes to showing empathy. The barrier is that autistic people first need to KNOW a person is feeling a certain way before they can even try to empathize with them.

But because autistic people often miss social cues and have a hard time reading people in social contexts... they will often not notice or not be able to tell that a person is feeling a certain way.

But even if you get beyond this barrier and the autistic person knows how someone is feeling, many autistic people (like myself) will have a hard time feeling empathy if they haven’t experienced what the other person is going through themselves (or something similar). 

There is actually a term for this type of empathy... it’s called cognitive empathy. The ability to empathize with someone even if you haven’t experienced what they’re going through yourself. 

This is why many autism evaluators have started using a second empathy measure called The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ), which measures emotional empathy... or a person’s emotional ability to understand and respond to others. 

With this type of empathy, a person draws from their own experiences when trying to understand what another person is feeling.

And, interestingly, according to research [link below], some autistic people actually experience elevated emotional empathy. Which is why you may notice a lot of autistic people sharing on social media that they are overly empathetic.

[ Research link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9804307 ]

But it’s important to note that this doesn’t apply to all autistic people. (To be clear, nothing does.) There are plenty of autistic people who struggle with both cognitive and emotional empathy. 

Personally, according to my diagnosis, I have high emotional empathy but lower cognitive empathy. Meaning if I have experienced something someone else is going through, I can become so empathetic that it’s actually painful for me. 

But if I haven’t gone through something similar, it’s hard for me to experience empathy for the other person. 

The best I can do is show sympathy and compassion. 

Now to add another layer of complexity to all of this... a significant percentage of autistic people have alexithymia (around 50%)... which is a difficulty identifying and describing a person’s own emotions.

So, someone who has alexithymia might know and understand what a person is experiencing... but because they have difficulty expressing their own emotions, they might struggle to express emotions related to the other person.

So they might FEEL empathy, but have a hard time EXPRESSING it.

Here’s where I’m going with all of this and what I hope you take away from this post... empathy is not a key feature of autism in the DSM for a reason. 

There aren’t enough autistic people who experience empathy in the same specific way to make it a key feature of the condition. 

The way autistic people experience empathy is all over the map according to the research. (Read the study I linked to earlier if you want to understand what I’m talking about better.)

And understanding this nuance matters. 

Because as the research study I referenced earlier perfectly stated, it will help us “move beyond the still prevailing conceptualization that autism is associated with a lack of empathy, leading to stigmatization and a negative impact on the autistic community.”

Ok, so this was a tough one to unravel (and took me a great deal of effort to find the right words to explain  )... but I hope this post created a pathway for some of you to better understand this topic. 

And if you liked this post and want to see more content like it, you know what to do