Empathising–systemising theory
The empathising–systemising 'theory' is a theory on the psychological basis of autism and male–female neurological differences originally put forward by clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. It classifies individuals based on abilities in empathic thinking and systematic thinking. It attempts to explain the social and communication symptoms in autism spectrum disorders as deficits and delays in empathy combined with intact or superior systemising.
According to Baron-Cohen, the E–S theory has been tested using the Empathy Quotient and Systemising Quotient, developed by him and colleagues, and generates five different 'brain types' depending on the presence or absence of discrepancies between their scores on E or S. E–S profiles show that the profile E>S is more common in females than in males, and the profile S>E is more common in males than in females. Baron-Cohen and associates assert that E–S theory is a better predictor than gender of who chooses STEM subjects.
The E–S theory has been extended into the extreme male brain theory of autism and Asperger syndrome, which are associated in the E–S theory with below-average empathy and average or above-average systemising.
Baron-Cohen's studies and theory have been questioned on multiple grounds. For instance, a 1998 study on autism found that overrepresentation of engineers could depend on a socioeconomic status rather than E–S differences.
History
E–S theory was developed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in 2002, as a reconceptualization of cognitive sex differences in the general population. This was done in an effort to understand why the cognitive difficulties in autism appeared to lie in domains in which he says on average females outperformed males, along with why cognitive strengths in autism appeared to lie in domains in which on average males outperformed females. In the first chapter of his 2003 book The Essential Difference, he discusses the bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, written by John Gray in 1992, and states: "the view that men are from Mars and women Venus paints the differences between the two sexes as too extreme. The two sexes are different, but are not so different that we cannot understand each other." The Essential Difference had a second edition published in 2009.The 2003 edition of The Essential Difference discusses two different sources of inspiration for Baron-Cohen's E-S theory. The first inspiration is epistemological with a number of influences including historicism and the German separation between erklären and ''verstehen, which Wilhelm Windelband described as nomothetic and idiographic methods. This was part of the positivism dispute in Germany from 1961 to 1969 where the human sciences and natural sciences disagreed on how to conduct social science. The second source of inspiration was interpreting gender essentialism from Charles Darwin's seminal book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. According to The Guardian regarding the publication's 2003 edition:
Prior to the development of E-S theory, Baron-Cohen had previously proposed and studied the mind-blindness theory in 1990, which proposed a homogenous explanation of autism as due to either a lack of theory of mind, or developmental delay in theory of mind during childhood. Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to themselves or others. The mind-blindness theory could explain social and communication difficulties, but could not explain other key traits of autism including unusually narrow interests and highly repetitive behaviors. Mind-blindness was later largely rejected by academia in response to strong evidence for the heterogeneity of autism, although some proponents in academia including Baron-Cohen existed as of March 2011.
Research
According to Baron-Cohen, females on average score higher on measures of empathy and males on average score higher on measures of systemising. This has been found using the child and adolescent versions of the Empathy Quotient and the Systemising Quotient, which are completed by parents about their child/adolescent, and on the self-report version of the EQ and SQ in adults.Baron-Cohen and associates say that similar sex differences on average have been found using performance tests of empathy such as facial emotion recognition tasks and on performance tests of systemising such as measures of mechanical reasoning or 'intuitive physics'. He has also argued that these sex differences are not only due to socialization. In a 2018 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Baron-Cohen's team demonstrated the robustness of the theory on sample of half a million individuals.
Fetal testosterone
While experience and socialization contribute to the observed sex differences in empathy and systemising, Baron-Cohen and colleagues suggest that biology also plays a role. A candidate biological factor influencing E and S is fetal testosterone. FT levels are positively correlated with scores on the Systemising Quotient and are negatively correlated with scores on the Empathy Quotient. A new field of research has emerged to investigate the role of testosterone levels in autism. Correlational research demonstrated that elevated rates of testosterone were associated with higher rates of autistic traits, lower rates of eye contact, and higher rates of other medical conditions. Furthermore, experimental studies showed that altering testosterone levels influences the maze performance in rats, having implications for human studies. The fetal testosterone theories posit that the level of testosterone in the womb influences the development of sexually dimorphic brain structures, resulting in sex differences and autistic traits in individuals.Baron-Cohen and colleagues performed a study in 2014 using 19,677 samples of amniotic fluid to show that people who would later develop autism had elevated fetal steroidogenic levels, including testosterone.
Evolutionary explanations for sex differences
Baron-Cohen presents several possible evolutionary psychology explanations for this sex difference. For example, he says that better empathising may improve care of children, and that better empathy may also improve women's social network which may help in various ways with the caring of children. On the other hand, he says that systemising may help males become good hunters and increase their social status by improving spatial navigation and the making and use of tools.Extreme male brain theory of autism
Baron-Cohen's work in systemising-empathising led him to investigate whether higher levels of fetal testosterone explain the increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among males in his theory known as the "extreme male brain" theory of autism. A review of his book The Essential Difference published in Nature in 2003 summarises his proposals as: "the male brain is programmed to systemize and the female brain to empathize ... Asperger's syndrome represents the extreme male brain".Baron-Cohen and colleagues extended the E–S theory into the extreme male brain theory of autism, which hypothesises that autism shows an extreme of the typical male profile. This theory divides people into five groups:
- Type E, whose empathy is at a significantly higher level than their systemising.
- Type S, whose systemising is at a significantly higher level than their empathy.
- Type B, whose empathy is at the same level as their systemising.
- Extreme Type E, whose empathy is above average but whose systemising is below average.
- Extreme Type S, whose systemising is above average but whose empathy is below average.
Apart from the research using EQ and SQ, several other similar tests also have found female and male differences and that people with autism or Asperger syndrome on average score similarly to but more extremely than the average male. For example, the brain differences model provides a broad overview of sex differences that are represented in individuals with autism, including brain structures and hormone levels.
Some, but not all, studies have found that brain regions that differ in average size between males and females also differ similarly between people who have autism and those who do not have autism.
Baron-Cohen's research on relatives of people with Asperger syndrome and autism found that their fathers and grandfathers are twice as likely to be engineers as the general population. A follow-up study by David A. Routh and Christopher Jarrold found disproportionate numbers of doctors, scientists, and accountants were fathers of autists, while "skilled and unskilled manual workers are less common as fathers than would be predicted". They hypothesised that this observed overrepresentation of science and accounting among autism fathers could be due to a sampling bias. Another similar finding by Baron-Cohen in California has been referred to as the Silicon Valley phenomenon, where a large portion of the population works in technical fields, and he says autism prevalence rates are ten times higher than the average of the US population. These data suggest that genetics and the environment play a role in autism prevalence, and children with technically minded parents are therefore more likely to be diagnosed with autism.
Another possibility has been proposed that spins the perspective of the extreme male brain. Social theorists have been investigating the concept that females have protective factors against autism by having a more developed language repertoire and more empathy skills. Female children speak earlier and use language more than their male counterparts, and the lack of this skill translates into many symptoms of autism, offering another explanation for the discrepancy in prevalence.