Diarmuid Verrier is a Lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). Stephen Connolly is a Lecturer in SHU’s Autism Centre. Lesley Kimber is a graduate of SHU’s MSc Developmental Psychology. Here they discuss the way in which mainstream narratives about autism and empathy can differ from autistic people’s own experiences of empathy.

In the early 2000s Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues published a series of works that described apparent differences between autistic people and non-autistic people. A central idea in these works was that autistic people have an empathy ‘deficit’ relative to other people. This was considered a major milestone in the development of public perceptions of autistic people. 

Since that work, there have been a further two decades of research and thinking in this area, and the scientific community’s ideas about autism and empathy are now more nuanced. However, this progress has largely happened without much input from autistic communities and there is still a persistent narrative within society that autistic people lack empathy. As such, it’s really important that autistic people’s views are being listened to, so that we can all better understand and challenge the stereotyping and misconceptions that autistic people encounter.

We recently published a study that sought to address this issue. The research was quite straightforward – we simply asked autistic people via an online survey to tell us about their empathic experiences and their perceptions of the autism empathy deficit narrative. We got useful data from 76 people, and then carried out qualitative analysis to pick out commonalities and underlying themes in what participants were saying.

We thought that there were four core themes across the data:

• Diversity of empathic experience: Rather than there being a consistent experience of low empathy, there was a huge amount of variation in the empathic experiences of participants. Some people identified with the low empathy stereotype, while others experienced very strong empathic responses. Some participants found these strong or ‘hyper-empathic’ responses to be so powerful that they could be distressing or trigger unpleasant physical sensations. 
• Empathy as an effortful process: While not true of everyone, some participants reflected on the fact that empathising takes work. It can be hard to pick up on the social and emotional cues that might warrant an empathic response, and actively expending energy to do so is potentially exhausting.
• Conditional empathy: Lots of people reported finding it easier to empathise with close others and with other autistic people. This makes sense, as it’s easier to be ‘in sync’, socially, emotionally and communicatively, with people who are more similar to us (see, for example, the double empathy problem). Many people also reported finding it easier to empathise with animals.
• Challenging the empathy deficit narrative: People were divided about how valid they thought the empathy deficit narrative was, typically in line with their own experiences. Importantly though, some people drew direct connections between this narrative and negative outcomes for autistic people, through stereotyping, prejudice and othering.

Why is it important to challenge this dominant empathy deficit narrative? In our own study, a participant mentioned clinical misdiagnoses due to the assumption that someone could not simultaneously be autistic and empathic. Beyond that, it is easy to imagine an autistic pupil in a history class learning about the atrocities of war and feeling so much empathy for victims that they are unable to continue with the school day but having this response labelled as ‘challenging behaviour’. Failure to account for such a diversity of empathetic experiences due to the enduring deficit narrative only contributes to the pain and discrimination autistic people experience. 

As with any study, there are limitations around how confident we can be about these findings. How well do they reflect the broad experiences across different autistic communities? Are there aspects of the empathic experience that we didn’t encounter? Further, while an online survey allowed us to collect a lot of data easily, it did mean that some of the qualitative detail that a face-to-face interview can generate was missing. 

In particular, we think it would be worthwhile to get more detail on how autistic people with intersecting identities experience empathy. Do factors like age, gender and culture interact with autism and lead to differing experiences of empathy?

A key finding from this study was how diverse experiences of empathy were across autistic people – something which has not been fully captured by previous research. In particular, this research contradicts the persistent narrative that autistic people have a deficit in empathy. Further research that incorporates the autistic voice and that is carried out on a wider scale needs to be done to better understand this range of empathic experiences. 

What is clear to us (and autistic communities) is that traditional research approaches that exclude autistic input have created disparities between autistic experiences and the narratives that come from research. Our study has highlighted one such disparity. Our findings demonstrate that autistic people do not inherently lack empathy, but instead there is a wide range of autistic empathetic experiences.  

To avoid similar misconceptions arising in future, and to help society move beyond the deficit narrative, researchers need to make sure that their research and findings accurately reflect the experiences of autistic people. To that end, further qualitative work that hears directly from autistic communities is essential.