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The idea that people who are autistic lack empathy is one of the most unfounded and pernicious myths out there
I think a lot of this myth come from differential performance on theory of mind tasks. But, performance on these tasks is heterogenous w/in populations. And, more importantly, theory of mind (& the tasks that "elucidate" it) is not the same thing as empathy.
A person might not draw upon the same social cues to make inferences about another person's knowledge/intention/feelings that other people do. That doesn't mean they do not have empathy re: the nature of the other person's experience. This is just false.
A certain % of the population draws on specific statistical input from facial expressions & prosody to make inferences about what another person is feeling. But not all people do. And that's just a difference in the link between info & interpretation. It's not a lack of empathy.
At the end of the day-& this is overly simplistic-but maybe useful: it's a matter of what info your brain processes and how it's processed. That is so diff than whether or not you understand human emotions, or whether you want to help people, or whether you care about their hurt
