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Simon Baron-Cohen

Simon Baron-Cohen Books

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“Against this catalog of social difficulties, we must keep in mind that AS involves a different kind of intelligence. The strong drive to systemize means that the person with AS becomes a specialist in something, or even in everything they delve into. One man with AS in Denmark who I met put it this way: “You people [without AS] are generalists, content to know a little bit about a lot of subjects. We people [with AS] are specialists. Once we start to explore a subject, we do not leave it until we have gathered as much information as we can.” In effect, the systemizing drive in AS is often a drive to identify the underlying structure in the world.”

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Book:The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
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“Systemizing and empathizing are wholly different kinds of processes. You use one process—empathizing—for making sense of an individual’s behavior, and you use the other—systemizing—for predicting almost everything else. To systemize you need detachment in order to monitor information and track which factors cause information to vary. To empathize you need some degree of attachment in order to recognize that you are interacting with a person, not an object, but a person with feelings, and whose feelings affect your own.”

EmpathyAutismEvolutionary PsychologySex DifferencesMental Modules
Book:The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
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“Some tasks that require good systemizing, such as tracking animals or inventing a new tool, take a long time. They might take days, months, or years. Many such tasks benefit from a lack of distraction and lots of hard concentration, preferably in solitude. So it might be that even if you were good at systemizing you might never accomplish anything great if you were also good at empathizing, since you might then have an equally strong drive to socialize. But supposing you were low on empathizing. You might then be content to lock yourself away for days without much conversation, to focus long and deep on the system that was your current project. In pre-industrial societies this could involve fixing old axe-heads, or perhaps a four-day trek into the forest in search of food for your family (this might be the ancestral equivalent of the modern day pilot). The pay-off from not needing people as much as others do could be great”

SocietySolitudeEvolutionary PsychologyAutism Spectrum DisordersSystemizers
Book:The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
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“The combination of low empathizing and high systemizing abilities might mean a rapid ascent of a man to the top of the social pile. This is because men in every culture compete against each other for success in social rank. As we mentioned above, a male’s position in the social dominance hierarchy in most species directly affects his fertility. For example, in some species it is only the alpha male that gets to reproduce. And even today, among modern humans, men with higher social status tend to have more children and more wives, compared with men of lower social status. To achieve social dominance, males use physical force, or the threat of force, or other kinds of threat (for example, withdrawing support). That is why, in most species, males are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than females.”

Evolutionary PsychologyDominanceReproductionAgressionEmpathizingSystemizing
Book:The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
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“If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”

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Author:Simon Baron-Cohen
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“Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.”

ChildrenUseActionParentMoralProduceDevelopmentDisciplineConsequenceMethodPunishmentChild AbuseDiscussingMoral Development
Book:The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
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“Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double-minded foucus of attention. When our attention lapses into single focus, empathy has been turned off. When we shift our attention to dual focus empathy has been turned on. Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to there thought or feelings with an approriate emotion. Empathy makes the other person feel valued, enabling them to feel that their thoughts and feelings have been heard.”

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Author:Simon Baron-Cohen
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“Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with a neighbor.”

WayProblemPoliticalConflictEmpathyUniversalDifficultyInternationalNeighborDisputesInterpersonalPersonal Problems
Book:The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
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