562. What Do We Actually Know About Autism? | Sir Simon Baron-Cohen

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One of the things we might want to do is lay out the cardinal features of autism. How would you characterize autism? Autism. Autism isn't just a single thing. There are multiple dimensions to autism, multiple factors. The fact that it's a multidimensional disorder risks obscuring its central features. If we just focus on the things that they have challenges with, it's like a deficit model. If we recognize that brains develop differently and that some brains focus more on systems than they do on people, there's growing evidence that autistic people are better than non-autistic people. at understanding systems, at pattern recognition, which is obviously a great asset in a lot of different environments. Hello, everybody. My guest today, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, is a world-renowned clinical psychologist and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge. He's done groundbreaking work on autism, empathy, systemizing, and the extreme male brain. In doing so, he's reshaped our understanding of neurodiversity. He's the author of numerous books, including his latest, The Pattern Seekers, How Autism Drives Human Invention. He spoke to us at length today about tool use, about theory of mind, and, most controversially, perhaps, the differences in male and female approaches to the world and male and female neurological structure. Join us for that. Well, Dr. Baron-Cohen, I have been looking forward to talking to you for a long time. I've followed your research, I don't know, for how long? 15 years, 20 years? A long time. And there's a lot of things that we, there's a lot of interests that we share. So, I thought what I'd do to begin with is outline your main domains of interest. And you can correct me and make sure that I've got that formulated properly because I would like to walk through them, you know, in some relatively systematic and empathic manner. So, tell me what you think of this breakdown. You're very interested in how people adopt the mindset of other people, how we understand other people. And I really want to talk to you about, so I want to throw some ideas at you and see how your vision of mutual understanding and emotional alignment differs and maybe is similar. You're very interested in gender differences. Let's call them sex differences, just to be politically incorrect. That shades off into your concern with systematizing versus empathizing, which is, I suppose, a dimensional analysis of interest, although it shades into temperament. You're quite curious about empathy and evil, and you're very interested in pattern-seeking. And so, are there other major domains that might be worth delving into, or does that give us a reasonable rubric? That's a great framework. And I just want to start by saying, I'm honored to be in conversation with you. I've been looking forward to talking to you for a long time, too. And actually, this is going to sound funny, but I was sitting right at the back when you spoke at the O2 Center in London. And that was probably one of your largest gigs. And I was way at the back row. So you were quite small on stage, but it was fun listening to you. And I'm looking forward to our conversation. In terms of the topics, I guess there's one other thing to mention, which is that I'm the director of the Autism Research Center. And I'm the director of the Autism Research Center in Cambridge. And on the long list of topics that you mapped out for us, I guess we'll probably touch on the field of autism and autistic people. Yeah, yeah, I guess I would have segued into that through systematizing and empathizing, but it is good to highlight it as a major, obviously, it's good to highlight it as a major concern, since it is a major research area of yours. Okay, well, that's good. Maybe we'll start, we'll start with understanding others. And so let me, I'm going to ask a relatively complicated question, and then I'd like you to indicate your agreements and disagreements, if you would. So I was very influenced in my understanding of social perception by JJ Gibson and his theory of affordances, and also by Jeffrey Gray and his essentially cybernetic neuroscience theory. And so, I'm understanding it at the moment, and it's relevant to an understanding of stories and also an understanding of mind, I think, is that we shape our perceptions around a goal, a destination, let's say. Our perceptions are guides to navigation. And when we occupy the conceptual space of someone else, we adopt their goal that sinks our perception and it also sinks our emotions because we experience emotions in relationship to a goal. And I was also influenced in that notion by Piaget, you know, the developmental psychologist who was interested in how children establish shared frames of reference in games. So anyways, I'm curious, start with that, if you would. It's interesting to hear your influences because mine are a little bit different. So for me, the major influence in how I think about other people's minds and the whole question of how do we imagine what someone else is thinking and what they might be feeling, the influence came from the philosopher Daniel Dennett. And I don't know if you know his work, but he published a-- Yes, I interviewed Dennett. Okay. And I know his work, yeah. Yeah, so he published a really, I think, really important book called "The Intentional Stance." Probably in the late '70s or early '80s. And the idea of the intentional stance is that when we look around at the world, like the world of objects, we don't particularly attribute mental states. But when we look at people, what humans do, and some people would say uniquely, is that we take this intentional stance. That's to say we try to imagine what's going on through their mind. And, you know, mental states, you know, he argued, cover not just emotions and goals, you picked out those two, but importantly also epistemic states, so beliefs, what people know. So in every conversation, in every interaction, what most people are doing is that they're monitoring the other person's state of mind. What does the other person know? What do they think? What do they want? What are they feeling? And in my terminology, more recently, I call that cognitive empathy. But Dennett called it the intentional stance, taking the intentional stance. So the word intentional is meant to cover the whole range of mental states that another person might have. And he gives this wonderful example in his book of how important this is, that every time we venture out on the highway, we are making assumptions about other people's mental states. For example, that other people want to stay alive, so they're going to stay in their lane and not swerve into our lane. And that other people can see us and we can see that they know that we can see them. So many different kind of unconscious sort of processing of what other people are thinking, what they believe, what they know, what they want. And that's happening in every conversation, or at least it should be. So the intentional stance, I think that that idea was influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, maybe Heidegger more particularly, because he insisted that our fundamental attitude towards the world was one of care. And that's a good way, I think, of uniting perception with emotion. If we perceive our perceptions of the world, I think it's a good way to do that. I think that's a good way to do that. Destinations. I guess you're doing that on the highway with other people, too. One of the destinations would be to arrive alive, for example. So you're inhabiting a shared structure of value, and that highlights certain perceptions and foregrounds certain perceptions and hides others. Okay, so. So I think you've just introduced an extra element, which is, do we care about another person? And I would say that that's an extra element, because you could adopt the intentional stance, but you don't care about another person. And that's a good way to do that. You could adopt the intentional stance, you could think about other people's thoughts without really caring about them. And you know, if you think about a psychopath, or somebody with antisocial personality disorder, they can model what someone else is thinking. But they may not care about the person's well being, they may not care about their feelings. So, you know, a psychopath, for example, can, you know, they can deceive you, they can manipulate you, to believe that something's true when it's not. They turn up at your front door, and they pretend that they are the gas man coming to read the gas meter. And then once they're in your house, they might mug you. So they clearly don't care. But most people don't operate with the lack of care. So that's why I kind of think there's a difference between the simple act of can you imagine what someone's thinking? And do you care about another person? Do you care about another person's feelings and whether they're going to suffer or not? Right? Well, that does it is it fair to say that? Is it fair to say perhaps that that's a matter of value prioritization? I mean, I've increasingly been conceptualizing antisocial behavior, even psychopathy, as a form of delayed immaturity. I mean, we know that two year olds are relatively egocentric. And we also know that there's a subset of two year olds who are willing to use aggression to pursue their ends. It's about 5% of boys seem to be like that temperamentally. Most of them are socialized by the time they're four, by the way, but the ones that aren't tend to be life term persistent offenders. But so if it's a imagine that the initial stages of maturity with regard to intention are narrowly self focused, right? So they might be a bit more empathic, even, you know, they're, they're, they're basic drive focused. And they don't take anyone else into account. They don't take reciprocal interactions into account. And then, as you mature, it seems to me that you prioritize the relationship over immediate gratification. Because you learn well, you learn that's the pathway to friendship, for example, because friendship is, go ahead. So, so I would take a slightly different view. I mean, people talk about the terrible twos, you know, and when my kids were two years old, I didn't find them terrible, actually. I mean, sometimes they sometimes they have their own wishes, and they get upset if they're frustrated that they can't have what they want. But I don't think most two year olds are just driven by self interest and purely in the pursuit of their own goal. So some some two year olds maybe, but you know, there are these studies, I'm sure you brought in Piaget, but also, you know, you're, you're really referencing the field of developmental psychology. But there are these tests that I'm sure you're aware of where the mother might be playing with a toy hammer. And she acts as if she's hit her thumb with a hammer and show some pain. And even two year olds will look up at the mother's face when she is in pain, they recognize that. And they may come over, they may come over and control it. They may console her, or give her a kiss, or give her a hug or a cuddle. You know, because she's acting as if she's in distress. So I don't see, I don't think even the typical two year old is oblivious to another person's feelings. And nor are they kind of like detached, I don't know, psychopaths, where they, they just don't care that somebody else is in pain. They actually have the natural reaction of wanting to alleviate another person's suffering. And, of course, there may be differences in maturation. I think that's what you're saying. We might get on to the controversial area of gender differences. And you know, whether girls on average, might be developing faster, in terms of being able to recognize other people's feelings and respond with an appropriate emotion. The, the way I started talking about this earlier was to talk about cognitive empathy, which, in my framework is the recognition element, recognizing what someone is thinking or feeling. But the flip side of the coin, the other fraction of empathy, I call affective empathy. And that's having, that's having an appropriate emotion, an appropriate emotional response to somebody else's state of mind. And, of course, for most people, most interactions, you know, combine the two. The cognitive impact, the emotional impact, the emotional impact, the emotional impact, the cognitive element, you know, I might be reading your face, I might be reading your body language, or I might be inferring what you're thinking or feeling from the context, what I know about you. But the affective part should be kind of kicking in very, very quickly. Because if I see that, if I see that you're bored, or if I see that you're a little bit upset or angry, I should, I should be responding in real time with an appropriate emotion. You're not alone. Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over 50 top insurers, so you can confidently hit buy. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai/wire today. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, supporting everyone from established brands to entrepreneurs just starting their journey. 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So I wonder if there's a way of bridging the gap between the approaches that we took. I mean, it seems to me likely that empathy, broadly speaking, is sufficiently crucial to social creatures like us, that it might be represented at multiple levels of neurological function. And so those affective responses, emotional responses that you described as characteristic of two-year-olds, which are obviously there, and which vary with the child's temperament to some degree. I wonder if those are a more primordial and an immediate form of social cognition contrasted with, and maybe this is related to your notion of cognitive empathy, with the understanding of long-term reciprocity that develops when children learn to play complex multiplayer games and extend them across time, right? So tell me again, that affect of empathy, is that more instinctual? What would you say is that? Yeah, I mean, I guess it begs the question, what do we mean by an instinct? But I'm sure it's very rapid. But what I liked about something you said earlier was about the developmental kind of timetable or the unfolding of these things in early childhood. Because I used to work in this field, and the field is broadly called theory of mind. When does a child develop a theory of mind? When is a child able to appreciate what someone else knows and believes and thinks? And the consensus back then, and I think the literature still supports this, is that it's not till about the age of three or four that kids can appreciate that somebody else may have a false belief. You know, that Jordan thinks it's Tuesday, but actually it's Wednesday. You know, so it takes till the age of about three or four, before kids can know what is true and understand that somebody else might hold a false belief about the world. And then it takes a little bit longer, not till the age of five or six, before they can do what's called second order false belief. You know, that I think that you believe that somebody else believes something false. That's a kind of, so it's kind of like at a meta level. And these, you know, I can easily see that these are kind of orders of magnitude of complacency. That kids have to master. And if we bring this back to autistic kids, there's quite a lot of evidence that they show delays in mastering some of these kind of social cognitive or levels of theory of mind reasoning. Let's diverge slightly into the realm of autism briefly. I want to ask you some specific questions there. So I know that. The classification of autistic spectrum disorders has widened tremendously since the original formulation of the concept. And I suppose that segues or shades into your work on systematizing and empathizing, which is maybe even a broader conceptual framework. I've, it seems to me, I mean, it may maybe depends on the severity of autism, but it seems to me that the notion that, relatively, severely, or even moderately, autistic people are impaired in their theory of mind is appropriate. But the initial symptoms of severe autism seem to me to be so, so neurologically primary that they point to something more fundamental. That maybe that theory of mind deficits are a secondary consequence because they don't, severely autistic children, they, they're often very delayed in their language development. And that's not true of, it's not particularly true of people with Down syndrome, who are also very cognitively impaired. They still develop language quite, quite, quite fluidly, let's say. But also, this is the strangest thing, I think, and you can tell me what you think about this, is that while autistic children often don't like to be touched, and that's really something, because mammals like to be touched. And so whatever's gone wrong is so primordial that it's part of a system that we share with all mammals. And so, so tell me how you reconcile that with the theory of mind hypothesis. So I guess the theory of mind hypothesis, I would criticize it as being too simplistic in the sense that autism, isn't just a single thing. There's multiple, there's, there are multiple dimensions to autism, multiple factors. And theory of mind may be just one of those. But if you, if you just focus on that, you may be missing many other aspects to autism. I'm just going to pick you up on a couple of things. One is the word severe. You talked about severe autism. And, you know, I wonder how we're going to define that. Because I think the way you were starting to define it is if a child's not talking. So if a child is not only autistic, but also has language delay, that makes it more severe. And I think you were also hinting that if a child not only is autistic, but also has a learning disability, or in the US it's called an intellectual disability. So their IQ is below the average range. Again, that would make it more severe. And I think what we've come to understand is that there are many different types of autism. Although we've only got a single word, in the US it's called autism spectrum disorder, ASD. I personally don't like that terminology, because the word disorder is quite stigmatizing. But nevertheless, so I just use the word autism as a kind of, you know, as a kind of barrier, as a kind of, you know, as a kind of barrier. But nevertheless, so I just use the word autism as a kind of barrier. , I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Taking that one indicator of language delay wouldn't have told us what his intellectual level was. And that's something that I've certainly learned, that you can have autistic people who have no expressive language, no speech. Maybe they need to communicate through devices, but cognitively or intellectually, they may be very smart. So it's very easy to kind of underestimate somebody just because they can't speak. Well, Well, Well, Well, Well, we can use that differentiation as a springboard to getting to the heart of two matters, I would say. So what I would, in an attempt to answer the question with regard to severity, one of the things we might want to do is lay out the cardinal features of autism. Because as a multidimensional disorder, I mean, the fact that it's a multidimensional disorder risks obscuring its central features. And I tried to highlight, I tried to highlight, I tried to highlight, I tried to highlight, language delay, and more importantly, antipathy towards touch, which I think is the most, I mean, that's just so incomprehensible, that particular. So how would you characterize autism at its core? And also, maybe we can use that to move into a discussion of systematizing versus empathizing, if those two things are intelligibly related. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll come on to that. I'll go to the definition of the core characteristics of autism in just one second. But I realize I didn't pick up on your quite interesting observation that some autistic people don't like to be touched. And again, I'm just being careful to not generalize it because it may not be true for all autistic people. But the way I interpret that, and you're absolutely right that most humans enjoy intimate touch, you know, it calms them down. It makes them feel emotionally closer to the other person. If it's in the context, for example, of a loving relationship, like between a parent and a child. So why would an autistic child or some autistic kids not like to be touched? And for me, that may come down to not understanding the other person's state of mind. What does the other person want when they touch you? It may come down, it may come down to the unpredictability of it. If somebody doesn't announce that they're going to touch you, and they just touch you out of the blue, we know that autistic people don't, in general, don't like things that are unpredictable. And it's going to kind of segue into this whole concept of systemizing, because if you can systemize the world, you can predict it. And autistic people, so this kind of brings us into maybe some of the areas of how you define, autism that autistic people have a hard time with unexpected change. change. If things are predictable, they do fine. And, you know, in the world of music, where you can play the same song over and over again, or watching your favorite video, and you can watch the same episode over and over again, the world is beautifully predictable. And some autistic kids really gravitate towards domains which are predictable, where there's the opportunity for repetition, so that there's nothing that catches them out. And clinically, like you, I'm a clinical psychologist. You know, what I see and what I hear autistic people tell me is that when unexpected things happen, they get very stressed. And, you know, and that could be just going into the classroom at school, but where instead of being able to sit in your favorite chair, or the chair you've always sat in, somebody else is sitting there, and you're expected to sit somewhere new. Or maybe there's even like a change in the wallpaper. It could be a small change, you know, it could be that your mum has given you a different t-shirt to wear, and the texture of that t-shirt is different to your favorite t-shirt. So it might be at a very sensory level, but it's a change. And so dealing with unexpected change, you know, seems to be a cause of, of challenge for many autistic people. But now, if we just go back to your main question, how do I define autism? I don't call it a disorder. I've already mentioned that. I see autism as a disability, that's really important to acknowledge. And the disability is in social relationships and communication, and also being able to cope with unexpected change. But I also see autism as a difference. And that word really comes from the relatively recent framework of neurodiversity. The autistic people, right from birth, and actually before birth, their brains are developing differently, not necessarily disordered, simply different. So that when they emerge into the world, they may not be looking, for example, at faces, the way a non-autistic child would be doing so, because faces move unpredictably, especially if you can't imagine what's behind the movement of someone else's face, or somebody else's eye. If I, if I suddenly look to my left, you can make sense of that, because you may be thinking, Simon has seen something that he's interested in, but you're already attributing a perceptual state, he's seen something, and, you know, an epistemic state, he's interested in something, maybe a volitional state, he's seen something that he wants. Young kids can make all of these attributions so that faces and facial expressions and eye movements are not confusing. They're actually, they're very easy to interpret. Autistic kids may be a bit delayed in reading another person's body language and facial expression and tone of voice, because they may have trouble with, with, with cognitive empathy or theory of mind. So, are you thinking that, and I'm thinking, I interviewed Temple Grandin, and so I'm going to talk about some of the things she said here in a moment, but are you hypothesizing, perhaps, as a unifying rubric, that the, the autistic condition is characterized by a relative inability to infer a uniting, it's like a uniting narrative or a uniting concept? Because what you, what you implied was that if I'm watching your face, which is changing, unlike the background, let's say, which is very stable, that the reason that doesn't trigger anomaly detection anxiety in me is because I understand the thread of our conversation, and that thread is a unifying reference point, and I can assume that all the manifestations of your differences, are a variation of that single thing. So, Temple Grandin told me that she can't, or she had real difficulty abstracting in a very particular way. So, she said, for example, and you see this with some autistic drawings, she doesn't, she can't bring to mind a generic church. You know how children draw a house with a triangle for the roof and a square for the house and a door and two windows? No house looks like that, but all houses are like that, right? It's more like a hieroglyphic or an abstraction, the same with those stick figures, right? They're kind of quasi-linguistic abstractions, and Grandin said when she thinks of any phenomenon, she doesn't think of a generalization, she thinks of a concrete exemplar and can't, and can't abstract upward. I wonder if that's the same issue as this lack of theory of mind. So, first of all, again, sorry to pick you up on that word lack, but it's a kind of, it's relative degrees of disability. You know, a lack of theory of mind is the extreme point, and I wrote a book back in 1995 called Mind Blindness, which kind of conveys this idea that some people might be too blind to be able to see, and some people might be too blind to be able to see, and some people might be totally blind to someone else's state of mind, but that would be the extreme case. For many people, and this is a spectrum of individual differences, but for many autistic people, it may not be a complete lack of theory of mind, it might just take them longer to infer what someone is thinking or feeling. And by the way, you used the word narrative in the of the narrative of our conversation. That assumes you've got linguistic information to go with that. You know, you can infer what the mime artist is thinking or what they're trying to communicate just through facial expressions, through eye movement, through gesture. So words, of course, give you another set of information, like a printout of what might be going on in someone else's mind. But the basic ability of just imagining what another person is thinking or feeling, or wanting or intending or hoping, you know, all of that could be done without words. And that's why you can have, for example, two deaf people communicating perfectly, well, without, without speech, just reading each other's hand movements or finger movements or facial expressions. Right. Can you infer a narrative merely through drama? I mean, that seems to me to be what you're pointing to is you can act it out, like, it seems to me that what a narrative is, is a verbal description of a drama, right? And the drama is embodied in the way that you described so that a mime artist can manage it or people can can act it out. I would say that the fundamentals, whether whether you're going to call it a drama, the fundamentals of communication is that two people, at least two people, establish a topic. And right now we're having a conversation. And we're both recognizing what is the topic of conversation. And that's an incredible thing when you stop to think about it. Because if you look at two, any, look at two individuals from any other species, if you think of two sheep in the field, or two dogs that might be in your home, the animals are not establishing a topic that they're then going to communicate about. And, and yet in humans, if you think about a typical toddler, they use the pointing gesture. So, you know, an 18 month old, even younger, a 14 month old child will point to something, look back at their parent to see if they're pointing to something. to see if the parent is looking at what they're pointing at. So they've established, they've established a topic of conversation, all without words. And autistic kids often are delayed in the ability to produce the pointing gesture. Oh, okay, okay. Or to, or That's crucial. Yeah, or if you suddenly look out the window, I'll turn to look at what you're looking at. Right. And a 14 month old child will do that. That was the work of Jerome Bruno at Developmentalist. He was a developmental psychologist way back in the 70s. He called it joint attention, or shared, shared attention. And of course, you can elaborate it into a narrative, because when we're in the audience, and we're watching a play in a theatre, we're not only modelling, what is the actor trying to convey what's going on in the actor's mind, but we're keeping track of how do all the sequences in the narrative fit together into a narrative arc. So you can make it as complex as you can. But the simple building blocks are being able to imagine what someone else is thinking or attending to. But can I, can I bring us back to something that you said about tempo? Grandin. Is that okay? Absolutely. Yeah, because I said that autism was a difference, not just a disability. And some of the differences include excellent attention to detail. Temple Grandin talks about this in some of her books, where she notices things that other people miss, just small details in the environment. So if she was looking in a church, she'd be looking at the shape of the windows or the number of the windows or, you know, the texture of the bricks, all the small detail. So, you know, excellent attention to detail, often excellent memory for detail. And then, you know, something that I introduced in my recent book, The Pattern Seekers, is excellent pattern recognition. And this kind of relates to what you were saying, that for non-autistic people, we seem to move. very quickly to the general. Although we look at specific things like this specific church, we very rapidly slotted into a category called churches. And then we kind of, we abstract so that if we're asked to draw the church, as you gave the example, we don't produce a very lifelike, a photographic representation of this particular church. No, it's icon. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, it's almost like it's, it's almost like, you know, our drawing or our memory of the object is filtered through what are the general property, properties of churches. Or if we have to draw a picture of a dog, we might have in our mind, kind of the general prototype of a dog, and that's what we draw. Whereas for an autistic person, the details matter. And actually, they seem to be very, they have a cognitive style, where they prefer to go, to stay in the specifics rather than to generalize very quickly. And that's, that brings us onto the topic of systemizing. Because when you systemize, what you're trying to do is understand a system that's in front of you. Could be any kind of system. It could be the light switch in the house, where you're trying to understand what happens if the switch is up or down. You know, is it turning on this light or that light? It could be the water faucet or tap, as we say in the UK. You know, if I turn the tap, you know, clockwise, the water comes out faster. So you're looking at these little systems in the world. It could be the keyboard in your house, where you kind of learn that if I play this note or this combination of notes, I get this particular sound. But it's the detail that matters. Because if you start, moving to the abstraction, or to the general, you're not going to understand the system in front of you. And I see this as an asset. You know, in the old days, they used to say that autistic people have difficulty generalizing. I actually see this as an asset rather than a disability. Because if you really want to understand, let's say the iPhone 10, rather than the iPhone 12, there's a world of difference in the operating systems between these two devices. And if you're going to become an expert in this device, you know, don't rush to try to understand what do all iPhones share. Just try and understand this particular system in front of you. And that could be true for anything you're trying to systemize. You know, you might be trying to understand the wings of a butterfly, of this particular butterfly, or, you know, the structure of a snowflake. Or, you know, how birds are able to fly, but not all birds, how this particular bird is able to fly. That's a natural system. You know, the iPhone is more of a digital or, you know, electronic system. Music, we talked about earlier, is a kind of, it's a set of notes. But what systems share is that they are rule governed. So, when you systemize, you're trying to analyze the rules that govern the system in order to predict how the system works, or to understand the system in great depth. So, this is kind of where I see the strengths of autistic people. And this kind of fits into this whole neurodiversity framework. But if we recognize that brains are not the same, we're not the same. We're not the same. develop differently and that some brains in some humans in the world focus more on systems than they do on people because systems are ultimately predictable if you focus on the rules. I call these if and then rules. If I take something and I do something to it, then I get a particular result. So it's kind of a Boolean logic trying to understand how a system works and bringing this back to autism, there's growing evidence that autistic people are better than non-autistic people at understanding systems, at pattern recognition, which is obviously a great asset in a lot of different environments. So do you see, okay, so two things. Is there a dimension of systematizing or systemizing and a dimension of empathizing? Like, because I've seen your model as systemizing on one pole and empathizing on the other, but okay, but no, but it's two distributions. Okay, one other question too, just to cram it in there and we'll get both of them at the same time maybe. Well, I couldn't help but think while you were talking that I guess this sort of came out of my, to some degree, out of my study of mythology. In the story of Genesis, it's engineers that build the Tower of Babel. Like, it's the people we would call engineers, and they're inclined to a kind of technological worship, but there's something deeper underneath that, I think, that might be relevant to the discussion that we just had, which is that human beings are staggeringly remarkable in their ability to use tools. And is that systemizing tendency natural variation in the proclivity? To use, to see the world as a place of tools? You know, in the, in the, in the Gibson model that I've elaborated, so if, once you specify a target of a destination, your perception orients it, orients itself to show you a pathway. Okay, now, destination, pathway, tools, obstacles, okay, but there's this, this, now, Gibson didn't talk about this, but there's a social equivalent, hey, because friends and foes are like the social analog of tools and obstacles. And then I'm one, I'm wondering if, you know, the empathizing types construe the world as a place of social relations in relationship to a goal, and the systemizers see tools and obstacles. You're, you know, you said the autistic, proclivity is also to hyper-react to the unexpected. You know, the unexpected is a very particular form of obstacle, right? It's when the system doesn't do what it's supposed to do. And you could imagine that if you're system-oriented, that part of that might be sensitivity to deviation, because it indicates a flaw in your understanding of this. So, is it associated with tool use, do you think? Is this something that fundamental? Sorry, is what's associated with tool use autism? Systemizing. Are the neurological variations you're describing variations in tool use proclivity? Absolutely. So, my last book, The Pattern Seekers, the subtitle was "How Autism Drives Invention." And the book is really a theory of invention, by which I mean, how humans, homo sapiens, uniquely have the capacity for generative invention. We don't just invent one tool and leave it at that. What seems to be unique about our species is that we invent unstoppably. And in the book, what I do is I go back through the archaeological evidence, which suggests that humans have been inventing complex tools for at least seventy to a hundred thousand years. And I kind of take the reader through, for example, the first bow and arrow, which the evidence is there in archaeology, was about seventy thousand years ago. It's a much more complex tool than the kind of tools that other species use. You know, a monkey or an ape that picks up a rock to use it as a hammer to crack a nut is using a tool but it's a very simple tool. And they could even just be achieving the outcome, getting the juicy fruit, through associative learning. using the the rock to crack the nut gets you the juicy fruit it gets you the reward and so they repeat that and many species of species have been repeating that kind of simple tool use for millions of for millions of years with no innovation there's no innovation and there's no complexity to the system whereas a bow and arrow uses this if and then boolean logic that if i take a stretchy fiber and i attach an arrow to it and release the tension then the arrow will fly so it's if and then and the first musical instrument again it's a complex tool was actually from 40 000 years ago it was the hollow bone of a bird which some one of our ancestors had drilled holes into it so it's a flute the first musical instrument that's been found you the if and then algorithm that drives human invention is if i blow down the bone and i cover one hole then i get a particular note but if i blow down the hollow bone and cover two holes i get a different note so the ancestor who invented this flute had created a complex tool and also had created a complex system which is music music itself music follows rules or patterns you know you can have different notes that sit in relation to each other you can have musical keys you can have musical phrases that repeat etc so just like any other system it's rule governed and back to your point is is systemizing a dimension of individual differences absolutely we can all systemize to some level so you know if something goes wrong at home you can try and fix it by understanding this by understanding the system you know if your door handle won't open that's the problem that you're the challenge that you're trying to solve and you might try and understand well what's actually stopping the handle from turning but you're using that you decompose it into parts yeah and what temple grandin was was kind of telling us and what you know autistic people do when they approach a problem is they try and take the problem apart they want to see what are the individual components the if the and and the then and what what drives human invention is that once we've understood the pattern the if and then we can then play with the if because that's one parameter or we could play with the and which is the operation engineers call it input operation output but i call it if and then and you know and some of us systemize better than others autistic people may systemize non-stop that they're looking around the world and they're fascinated by how is that table made how is the leg of the table actually joined to the the table surface itself you know or why is that table leg a little bit wonky you know so they're trying to understand the system or could you know could you take an existing system and make a change to it so that you've invented a new system and uh you know we can think of autistic people who have used systemizing to their advantage and one example would be elon musk elon musk came out as autistic a few years ago um you know he's an engineer and we can take this back we can take this back to the tower of babel you know when the old testament was being written you know that may have only been 3 000 or 5 000 years ago humans have been doing this systemizing for at least 70 to 100 000 years building things as complex as the tower of babel but the engineers the systemizers needed to make sure that the tower was going to stand up and was going to be able to withstand the power of the tower of babel and so we've been doing this systemizing for at least 70 to 100 000 years the wind was made in from the right materials how all the pieces were going to lock together just like when we drive over um i don't know the the bridge in san francisco those were the engineers and the systemizers who produced that incredible invention but the empathizers might be you know again it's another bell curve of individual differences some some people some people have a greater interest or drive to empathize and they're the ones who are going to might be kind of much more focused on communicating and checking how other people in the community are checking in with their friends with their family making sure nobody's left out they're not so they're not so focused on you know um why is the door sticking or you know how is this radio made but they're they're more interested in you know can i communicate can i can i create relationships and can i look after relationships now you have associated the differences with sex differences as well and i know among chimpanzees there are marked sex differences in in play toy preference and juvenile chimps so the if you give a male juvenile something that approximates a doll he's likely to tear it apart whereas a female is likely to take even a block of wood and treat it as if it's an infant let's say and those like chimpanzee juvenile males prefer wheeled toys to infant like toys which is quite remarkable given that they don't really have any what they don't now now i'm wondering you know if there's an association between that and hunting for example and also um i'm curious about what you've made of the sex differences you know we kind of hypothesized already that there's a that a landscape perceptual landscape could be differentiated systematically so you're looking for tools and obstacles or it could be differentiated socially i mean obviously your relationships with people are another means to joint ends or individual ends i mean so you could imagine the world lays itself out to people as a place of things or as a place of social interactions and it also sheds some light on maybe the hyper reactivity to novelty that is characteristic of the systematizer because if one of the potential pitfalls of paying attention to detail would be sensitivity to variation in detail whereas if your proclivity is to perceive higher up the abstraction chain those differences are going to vanish in the generalization yeah but as soon as you move to the general you're going to lose a lot of information right right of course that's part of the advantage of moving to the general yeah so if i call them hyper systemizers a hyper systemizer which may characterize some or many autistic people they care more about the particular system in front of them to understand this particular system so what would be an example um uh so let's say that the child is building a tower out of lego bricks many autistic kids love lego you know and they because you know and they often focus for long periods you know sometimes it's called obsessions but i think that's a kind of pejorative way of describing what they're doing they're locked into the detail of how do all the bricks fit together and what what they're trying to build um you know but they may not be looking at other children's faces in the play in the in the room or at adults who are trying to interact with them because they're so focused on the system that they're trying to build um you know they're not trying to think of what what are all the different possible systems i could build they're just trying to build this particular system once they've done that they may then under their own control make a change to the system so it's not that they're averse to all change but they want change to be under their control and i guess what's challenging for autistic kids or for a systemizer a strong systemizer is in the social world in the playground for example you've got kids running around you've got lots of people talking to you at once there are you know some of the verbal communication may not be literal so you're trying to track the meaning of words when someone's using sarcasm or using metaphor or other kinds of figurative language you know you've got not just focusing one-to-one like in our conversation it's it's a little bit easier because it's one-to-one but imagine if we were in the pub and there are six people talking at once and you're trying to keep track of what does one person think about what someone else has just said or what someone else is thinking so it's these multiple levels of employing a theory of mind in real time and being expected to react with a socially appropriate response all of that there's too many moving parts whereas taking apart a transistor radio and putting it back together again or taking apart i'm going to use kind of a nice domestic example imagine a three-year-old child who takes the toaster in the kitchen takes it apart to understand what is it what what happens inside when i push the lever down and when the lever comes up and the toast pops out you know that's that's a child who's going to be a future engineer a future systemizer and i think for a long time you know because i've been working in the field of autism for 40 years the in in the bad old days we would have tried to discourage autistic kids and autistic people from their repetitive um repetitive behavior sometimes called obsessional behavior we thought that was bad for them because they're never going to learn about the real world if all they do for hours and hours is take the toaster apart and put it back together again but actually that's their learning style for many autistic kids and if we if we see that not as a bad thing but as a good thing you know that they take a 1 000 piece jigsaw puzzle and they can they want to put it together again in a complete way to understand how every piece fits into the whole you hear of these anecdotes of autistic kids who can do that maybe not even using the picture on the sort of the right side of the jigsaw puzzle they can do it face down so they're using the shape and understanding how every shape locks in a unique way with every other shape but they can do this very rapidly so it's kind of we should focus on the strengths of autistic people and you know that that could then become their stepping stone into flourishing in education and flourishing in the place of work but if we're expecting all kids to be hyper social you know checking each other's faces checking each other's relationships and body language and reading between the lines picking up hints you know autistic kids may feel made they they may appear to be struggling whereas if we focus on their what you know their strengths we can say well this kid's got a gift you know let's not worry about whether the child is making eye contact or not you know let's just let the child learn in their own way and see how far they can go and you know parents who recognize their child's autism as it's neurodivergence you know that we we don't have to expect all kids to learn the same way to process information in the same way just let the kid follow what they're interested in you know those kids might decide i want to do mathematics all day and sure enough they and they end up in university and they're on you know they're they're on the fast track into advanced mathematics even if along the way they're not going to be able to do it they're not going to they haven't really managed to learn how to write an essay with a beginning a middle and an end which communicates to a reader because that's not their interest their interest is how numbers fit together just like how pieces of the jigsaw fit together are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims you're not alone that's why there's jerry your proactive insurance assistant jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over 50 top insurers so you can confidently hit no spam calls no hidden fees jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop drivers who save with jerry can save over 1300 a year don't settle for higher rates download the jerry app or visit jerry.ai slash wire today let's talk about the relationship between this hyper focus on tool use and systemizing as opposed to functioning in a way that's not going to work for you in the social world and sex differences and also the consequences of that in the education system so and and i want to add another dimension to just before i stopped being a university professor i was starting to take a look at the relationship between your scales systemizing and empathizing and the big five personality dimensions because empathizing sounds an awful lot like agreeableness right at a trait level i'm wondering if if i should know this but i don't if there's been some some well-conducted research assessing the relationship between these interest patterns i mean there there are there are studies of interest patterns as well the ryosek model i can't remember who developed that i mean there is a there is a taxonomy of interests right that that's been quite quite well documented but i was curious about it temperamentally so let's start with the interest patterns and i'm wondering if let's talk about the sex differences the implications of that in education and yeah and then the temperamental issue sure so um i should have really responded to your question about sex or gender differences earlier but let's let's bite the bullet um so um we found over many years actually that in the general population that's to say the non-autistic population there are these on average sex or gender differences both in empathy and in systemizing so what we find in small scale studies is that girls and women on average score higher on tests of empathy and on measures of empathy and boys and men on average score higher on tests of systemizing and measures of systemizing i say small scale because back in the day we would be testing a few hundred people but now you can do online research you can really do research at scale so we published a study back in 2018 which was 600 000 people taking the empathy quotient the eq and the systemizing quotient the sq they did it online so that's how we could achieve such large sample sizes and we found sure enough replicating the smaller studies that women on average score higher on the eq and men on average score higher on the sq how big a difference is it in in standard deviation terms it's a great it's a great question it's a significant difference i'd need to look up the effect size and i could you know contact you after the conversation but it's a significant difference and when especially when you have these large samples you know they jump out at you they were robust gender differences uh we've also used um a performance test of empathy called the eyes test it's also called the reading reading the mind in the eyes test where you look at photographs of people's eyes and the test is whether you can infer what someone might be thinking or feeling just from looking at the emotional expression around the eyes because the eyes so that's a gestalt it's a gestalt yeah i mean it is it's a if you imagine like a letterbox you've only got this much information but it turns out to be very rich in information about another person's state of mind and women on average score higher on the it's called the reading the mind in the eyes test compared compared to men and just a few years ago 2022 we published a study showing across 57 different countries so this was kind of independent of culture you see this female excuse me female superiority on the test are there tests that are that straightforward on the systemizing side that show the male advantage there are i mean one quite old one which you may remember is called the embedded figures test where you have to find a target as quickly as you can and then you have to find a target and then you have to find a target that's embedded in a larger design and men are faster and more accurate in finding the part within the whole so that might be a systemizing test um we've we've just completed the development of another test which is more about mechanical reasoning trying to you know asking people whether a lever will move up or down depending on the cogwheels that are moving in different directions so you're having to kind of look at the other side of the test and you're looking inside an old-fashioned watch to understand the drivers uh the cogwheels driving movements of levers and males perform faster and more you know higher this they score higher on average on that test so these are controversial areas as you know because you know the field of sex difference research or gender differences research and so you know we all want a society which is uh where there's gender equality but that's more about our social values it's not necessarily a scientific question about whether male and female children and adults whether their minds work in the same way on average and i keep using those two words on average because the best we can do as scientists is compare groups of females and groups of males on these different measures and see if we find a difference in the temperament the differences in agreeableness which i think are most closely related to empathizing they're they maximize in gender neutral societies they don't minimize right so the so yeah so in this case this is this is not controversial research from the technical perspective because it's been unbelievably well established you know so you can rank order countries by the degree to which they've implemented sexual say parity in the law and in society on sexual grounds and then you can look at the differences in magnitude of temperament differences between men and women and what you find is clearly the case that well for example differences in agreeableness and neuroticism are maximized in the scandinavian countries so if you flatten out the environmental variation you seem to maximize the genetic variation and i'm curious with regards to empathizing and systemizing if you rank ordered if you did the same analysis do you know if there's any evidence that it's a great question i haven't seen any research on it but first of all i going back to your question about is empathy closest to agreeableness if we think about the big five personality dimensions that makes sense to me and there may be some data out there that confirms a correlation but agreeableness i would say and you know you're the personality psychologist here between the two of us so you tell me but you know agreeableness to me involves keeping track of what how someone else is feeling and what they might be thinking you and i are having a very polite conversation so we're being very agreeable probably because we we don't want to insult each other we don't want to hurt each other's feelings so we're kind of exercising our agreeableness but that is really what i was calling empathy earlier on you know if you don't care about you know the other person's feelings you can be as rude as you like you know driving your point home in a debate uh you could um be very blunt you could you know you could be very direct you could be very um yeah insulting there's all kinds of you know different ways that you could use language which would not be agreeable even if even if you're making a very logical point so you know i think i'd agree with you on on that kind of overlap between these these dimensions of individual differences well the the more the most relevant element of that i would say is not so much the somewhat obvious point that agreeableness and empathizing might be associated i would say what's more interesting from a scientific perspective is that there's a lot of social perspective is whether low agreeableness is associated with systemizing because one of the things that's peculiar about the personality and psychopathology research is that there's a tremendous number of positive trait uh names and identifiers on the empathizing side on the agreeable side but there's very little positive about the disagreeable side and that's a big mistake because it's a normal distribution for a reason and there's just as many reasons to be disagreeable as there are to be agreeable the question is like and you know this is a comic trope with regard to engineers because they tend to be somewhat parodied as blunt and disagreeable in their prioritization of systemizing over empathizing do you ever watch the big bang theory of course yeah yes well so so i mean all of the humor in the big bang theory is systemizing over empathizing yeah pretty much and yeah and that that character what's the name of the main character in the big bang theory the fit yeah the the gangly physicist yeah is it steven simon no neither neither of those it'll come back to both of us in a second but you know some people are you know wonder whether he's he's playing playing the role of an autistic person you know because he's he's fascinated by science and the world of systems and technology you know but he may not be paying equal attention to other people's feelings in the room you know we have this phrase you know read the room you know autistic autistic people and maybe you know some engineers uh may be less focused on reading the room because they're focused on understanding the system and making sure it's working you know right now you and i are surrounded by mechanics and engineers making sure that the cameras are working fine the sound systems are working fine and that's their job you know that's their their that's their talent and they may be kind of less you know focused on are we are we are we both comfortable or are we are we communicating are we on the same topic you know they're more kind of focusing on the engineering of our interaction or of the the the situation but coming back to gender just because i know that you know this is a again a topic of mutual interest um the reason i say on average gender differences is you can find individuals who are atypical for their gender when we do those when we do those big studies you know we've we've classified the population into people who lean more towards empathy than systemizing or those who lean more towards systemizing than empathy so those are two brain types we call them type e and type s and then there are people in the middle who are kind of equal in their empathy and their systemizing we call them type b for balanced and then there are people at the extremes people who empathize non-stop but maybe may find systemizing challenging and vice versa people who systemize non-stop and may find empathy challenging and in that case we call them type e and type s and then there are people who are at the extremes and in that big online study we had 36 000 autistic people take part and they tend to be in the type s profile um so leaning more towards systems than empathy or even in the extreme type s where there's a bigger discrepancy between their systemizing and their empathy but back to gender you know you can find females um well maybe i should kind of back up a little bit what we find is that more women than men are type e it's about 40 percent of women and 20 percent of men and more men are type s again it's about 40 percent of males and 20 percent of females but this is already kind of telling you that this isn't about gender it's about you know because you can't you can't prejudge an individual man or a woman just from their gender it's about the type of brain that they have and so kind of bringing this into politics if you like it would be wrong to prejudge a female applicant in a job let's say the job is an engineering job based on her gender um or if the job was all about communication skills and empathy maybe you're being interviewed to be uh a good psychotherapist again it would be wrong to assume that the woman would be the better fit for the therapist job and the man would be the better fit for the engineering job because it's not about your gender it's about what kind of brain you have and you know even if we see these on average differences between the genders and those are interesting we've been very interested to see whether one of the drivers of those on average gender differences are prenatal hormones like testosterone which you know and the male fetus produces twice as much testosterone than the female fetus and that hormone has been demonstrated in animal studies to change brain development but supposing you're a female fetus exposed to a higher level of testosterone prenatally in the womb you might end up with a brain that's a bit like temple grandin you know she she engineers systems even though she's chromosomally female there were studies done on a cohort of androgenized girls um they were looking the studies that i recall were done to look at sexual preference because the androgenized girls had more male pattern had a more masculine pattern of play and but they it turned out that it had very little effect on their on their sexual attraction they they were more masculine in their play patterns as juveniles but it didn't tilt them towards female attract i don't know if that have the androgenized females being studied in relationship to systemized systemization or um so we did a study way back where we looked at a medical condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia and so these are girls who for genetic reasons are producing more androgens prenatally and um their play is more masculinized in terms of their choice they they tend to choose toys that typical boys would choose like the lego and the toy vehicles and so forth and they were we we gave them a test of autistic traits actually so we asked the parents to um assess how many autistic traits the the girls with cah congenital adrenal hyperplasia have relative to their sisters raised in the same environment who do not have cah so what you know one one group of girls were hyper androgenized and the other group of girls biologically related were not and we found that the the girls with cah had a higher number of autistic traits and they have been studied they have been studied for their kind of interest in in um in objects and systems uh by melissa hines as well the the the person who i'm whose work i'm most familiar with um so i don't want our our listeners to think that hormones are the only factor because obviously children are born into a particular world where maybe girls and boys are treated differently by their parents they're exposed to different types of hormones and they're exposed to different messages from the media from the toy industry even teachers may be unconsciously treating treating boys and girls differently so social factors may well be feeding into all this but we were quite interested to see whether prenatal hormones or some aspect of our prenatal biology may also be playing a role i'm going to touch we're unfortunately we have 15 minutes left in this section i think for everyone watching and listening what we're going to do on the daily wire side is talk about the political ramifications of this work but also the personal consequences of the political ramifications because i'm interested to hear your story about you know the the public reception of your work and how that's impacted your ability to do research and what that's taught you so i think we're going to talk about that on the daily wire side one of the things we haven't talked about yet that constitutes a very important aspect of our work is that we're going to talk about the shared interest that's relevant to what we've been discussing as well as you've written books that that are uh focused on the issue of malevolence uh psychopath like psychopathy you wrote zero degrees of empathy you wrote science of evil and i mean i'm very interested in malevolence and and in cruelty and and and in psychopathy not so much the callousness as the callousness as the guilty and so i'm curious we only have 15 minutes but i would like to know first how that interest relates to your other interests but also maybe you could give us a bit of an insight into your broad conclusions yeah so just of all first of all just to say that our listeners are not confused the book the two books that you mentioned are the very same book but they came out under different titles in the uk it's called zero degrees of empathy and in the us it's called the of evil oh okay okay um i wouldn't want people to rush out to the bookstore and buy both books because they'll just discover that as soon as they open it that it's the same book under two different titles but um i i start that book with a personal anecdote which is that when i was seven years old my father told me about the holocaust you know i come from a jewish family and for many years my father told me that the holocaust is kind of one of the the big questions about how could human beings treat one another with such extreme cruelty you know and he told me about the gas chambers he told me about how jews were subject to human experimentation and he told me that his first girlfriend's mother had her hands amputated in the concentration camp and sewn on backwards so that her thumb was where her little finger should be and vice versa so the nazi doctors which were conducting experiments on people out of a fascination with what was possible trying to break through new barriers in in surgery for example but without any regard for the patients or the inmates subjectivity or feelings you know and i got you know so this has been a lifelong memory for me about about cruelty and uh often extremes of human cruelty are just dismissed as evil i say dismissed because you know what you often hear in a court of law a criminal court is the defendant is evil that's why he or she committed these acts of cruelty whereas for a scientist i don't feel the word evil really explains what's happened how has the person able to do that whereas i think looking at the the idea of empathy and the idea that we may either be born with different levels of empathy so for genetic and neurological reasons or we may lose our empathy perhaps because of social factors ideological factors you know think about the people that flew the planes into the twin towers on 9-11 and they believed that they were doing the right thing without much thought for the victims that they were about to create you know so i'm so i guess that's one answer to your question is that i i thought that if we take the idea of empathy and individual differences in empathy that might give us more explanatory power into the question of why do some people behave with cruelty and others behave with kindness why do some people rush over to help other people when they see a victim in the street they see an old lady has fallen down that the empathy is the impulse to rush over and help to alleviate somebody else's suffering and other people will walk by you know the so-called bystander effect in social psychology um you know that they can almost switch off their empathy so that's one reason why i got got into that and wrote that book um but also and i was just trying starting to explain when you look across the range of disabilities and conditions in in psychiatry whether we're talking about autism or psychopaths empathy seems to be a kind of it comes up a lot it seems to be something that crops up a lot across people with different diagnoses and i really wanted to kind of explore in a single book how different aspects of empathy can result in different outcomes so in the case of autistic people they seem to have very good affective empathy they care about others but they have challenges in cognitive empathy that's to do with the recognition part you know interpreting or inferring what someone might be thinking or feeling once it's pointed out to them they they care about another person and they want to you know they want to stand up for justice they want to help people the psychopath almost has the mirror opposite profile they have good cognitive empathy we talked about this a bit earlier that's how they can deceive others and make you believe that something's true when it's not but they don't seem to care about others so they've got they've got reduced affective empathy and that's how they're able to torture their victims for example without caring i read a study recently that showed that um there was some substantial variation in periaqueductal gray activation in people when they were observing the suffering of others and so periaqueductal gray activation seems to be pretty tightly associated with the experience of pain and so part of that empathy could be something as direct as when i see you in pain what i experience is a pain-like response and you could imagine wide individual variation in that and i think that's a really good study and i think that's a really good and so okay and so let me turn that a little bit because there's a there's a tough question lurking here too which is it seems to me likely that what you're pointing to is the relationship between the capacity for cruelty or callousness and lower levels of empathy now you know it's one thing to walk by an old lady who's fallen down on the street and not help and it's another thing to kick her right and so mere lack of empathy doesn't seem to me to suffice for positive cruelty but then i'm also curious like you've contrasted systemizing and empathizing and i think maybe you already answered this with regards to your distinction between affective and cognitive empathy but is there so there is evidence that lower empathy might be associated with callousness you'd see also that with agreeableness by the way that's mirrored in the trait in the trait uh research but is there is there indication that systemizing is associated with more callousness or is that merely a matter of of that cognitive empathy blindness so to speak exactly i think it's more the latter so when we were talking earlier we i was i was um presenting this idea as if empathy and systemizing are two independent dimensions yes so in the way i've kind of um tried to explain this in my work i literally plot you know empathy along the y-axis and systemizing along the x-axis and you can and you can find all of us fall somewhere all of us fall somewhere in that space in the four quadrants but um we do find a small but significant inverse correlation there's a kind of trade-off that the higher your empathy uh the more difficulty you have on systemizing and vice versa obviously it's true that you can find very empathic systemizers um and very systematic empathizers but nevertheless you know the population isn't randomly distributed we tend to kind of you know you know we said earlier that more women tend to be up and towards the empathy end of um that those two uh distributions and more men tend to be you know leaning more towards the or located more towards the systemizing end of those two distributions um you know i think uh when we think about autistic people as i said they don't tend to be callous they tend to sort of they tend to struggle with understanding other people other people and so you know some of them even avoid other people they're not out to hurt others they may just retreat into the world the predictable world of objects and systems you know the child who's playing with their lego is a kind of almost a stereotype of an autistic child they're not they're not actively seeking to hurt others but what you were describing where somebody goes over and actually kicks the old lady that's not that's not just low empathy there's some kind of pleasure in hurting and hurting another person so obviously obviously we need to factor in more than just empathy you know that if you're a child for example who's been bullied and um you know it makes you feel bigger and stronger to bully others you know we have this phenomenon where the victim turns into a victimizer which has always been a paradox for psychiatry why is it that you know why is it that that kids who know what it feels like who know how they know how painful it is to be a victim of a child is to be on the receiving end of child abuse for example when they grow up might abuse their own kids you know not and it's not deterministic it's not that they all do that in fact most of them don't right most people who are abused as children don't grow up to abuse their children although most people who abuse their children were abused as children so yeah so there there are these really interesting important developmental um sort of effects that we need we need to understand you know and you know if if you if you do engage in cruelty like child abuse or hurting others is it just a lack of empathy or is it that it's actually the activity itself is giving you something yeah positive delight i think you can't understand the phenomenology you were describing in the concentration camps without taking like real sadism and the dark tetrad research seems to indicate that too you know it's just the dark tetrad was originally the dark triad machiavellian psychopathic and narcissistic but further investigation indicated that sadism was a necessary addition and sadism is best defined as positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others right so there's a there's a kick there that's not merely like inability to experience uh like direct physiological empathy your pain is my pain yeah there's this word called schadenfreude that i'm sure you know you know taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune so it's not just a kind of lack of empathy uh or not caring it's actually sort of you know that it that someone else's misfortune actually makes you feel bigger and stronger in in the story of cain and abel cain becomes murderous obviously and then he's the father of the genocidal mob essentially that's how the story develops but the story there's a very interesting interchange between him and god right at the beginning of the story because cain is complaining bitterly to god that his sacrifices aren't being accepted and that he's a failure and god says two things to him he says if you did well you'd be accepted so implying that cain isn't exactly bringing his best to the table but then he also tells him that his theory of his misery is wrong god says you think you're miserable because you've been rejected and you failed but actually what happened is that you were rejected and you failed and you didn't learn from it and then something came along to tempt you that's sin that crouches at the door and you invited it in right to have its way with you he used god uses the analogy of a sexually aroused predator and tells cain that he invited this spirit in and that that's what's possessing him right it's a very sophisticated psychological analysis because it's it's not merely let's say a deficit in empathy there's a there's another factor which is it's something approximating a decision or a series of decisions to to to revel in to revel in suffering and and that's not something psychologists have done a good job of explaining are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims you're not alone that's why there's jerry your proactive insurance assistant jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over 50 top insurers so you can confidently hit buy no spam calls no hidden fees jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop drivers who save with jerry can save over thirteen hundred dollars a year don't settle for higher rates download the jerry app or visit jerry.ai slash wire today no but i mean you've you've reached to the bible as one set of stories to try and fix this but we could we could reach to a much closer example closer to home which is sibling rivalry you know because sibling rivalry was described as something that's quite normative you know if you have kids as parents it's one of the most heartbreaking things is to see two of your kids fighting each other or arguing with each other and you know when we just want our kids to love each other right right competition for status and attention well that's part of the cain and abel story too of course because that's a sibling rivalry story absolutely so you know whether they're whether they're competing for resources or competing for parental attention you know there may be something more than empathy that's at play in terms of what's driving our behavior yeah you know that we that we feel better if we're maybe higher status or yeah exactly feel a bit more powerful yeah well it's something like a turn to power as an adaptive strategy right a turn to power and domination rather than reciprocity and cooperation but if we go back to those doctors in the concentration camps performing medical experiments mengele being you know maybe the prime example where he was he was doing experiments on twins you know he was interested in the biology of twins and trying to do experiments on twins children jewish twins that were brought in as prisoners can we do experiments where we could remove the organ from this child and see what happens given that they're genetically identical you know that wasn't sadism in the sense or he wasn't necessarily getting pleasure out of it he was just pursuing scientific curiosity but where the nazis had said it's okay to treat people as subhuman it's okay to treat people as subhuman it's okay to treat people as subhuman it's okay to treat this group of people as if their subjectivity it doesn't matter just like many in many uh labs animal research is conducted it's almost as if we say well it's okay to experiment on a rat or on a mouse um maybe we'll anesthetize them but we're still going to sacrifice them for the sake of our scientific question and under the nazi regime jews and other minorities were treated as subhumans almost giving them a license or permission to treat other people as if they were objects right right well that seems and i guess maybe we'll close with that that seems at least in part like a move to subordinate the empathic to the systemizing right is that you can treat people one of the contributing factors to the kind of evil that you described is the possibility of treating people as if they're no more than cogs in a machine or parts of a inanimate parts of a system and i know that we're kind of running out of time so i'll be brief on this point but you know If we look at that period from 1933 when Hitler got into power through to when the concentration camps were in full swing in the early 1940s, they were incremental changes where, you know, step by step, Jews and other minorities were being deprived of their civil rights, their human rights, you know, being treated as if they were people without feelings and didn't, you know, didn't warrant equal status in society. And if that happens, that's a kind of shift in our political climate. And it's very easy for these social changes and political changes to erode empathy. We can start treating refugees as if they are less than or we can treat other minorities as if they are inferior if it's legitimized by. For example, the government. So many ethical conundrums are rectified by striking the right harmonious balance. And I guess that's what we've concluded with regards to systemizing and empathizing. So for everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue our discussion on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour. And I'm going to talk to Simon about his. More the political ramifications and repercussions of his research and what all that also means for the state of investigative science, all things considered, especially on the clinical end. So it would be good if those of you who are inclined would join us on the Daily Wire side for that conversation. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. It's been a pleasure. I could talk to you for much longer and delve into more of the details about our differences and similarities in understanding and interpretation. I'd sure love to see that Big Five research, done on systemizing in particular and agreeableness because it's a burning question. So at least for a personality theorist. And I don't have a lab anymore, unfortunately. First of all, I want to thank you because the conversation, I've really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to the next segment after the break. All right, good. And thank you everybody for your time and attention. Well, some races draw attention. Others become the race everyone watches. In Texas, James Tallarico and Ken Paxton are facing off in one of CalShee's most traded midterm markets. Follow the race in real time on CalShee and then trade on the candidate you think is going to win. Each correct contract is worth $1 at settlement. 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