Autistic People Feel Empathy

But they are denied empathy by others.

I’m having a week of writing about neurodivergence, it seems like. (On Musk and autism; on RFK and autism.)

So, as long as I’m on a roll, I thought I’d talk a bit about a topic that isn’t exactly a news hook, but which comes up a lot—autism and empathy.

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One of the most common, and most harmful, stereotypes of autistic people is that we don’t feel empathy. Autistic people are, supposedly, turned inward and walled off from others. Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man is as always the iconic example; Raymond is obsessively focused on his own rituals and his own internal dialogue and tics. The film occasionally gives you a close-up of his blank expressionless face, asking you to contemplate his absence and his alienness.

Raymond cannot communicate because (again supposedly) he does not have the affective or intellectual ability to recognize the humanity of himself or others. He cannot imagine himself into others which means that he doesn’t really have a self; he is outside the human community, not even really bothering to look in.

This vision of autistic isolation and anti-empathy has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Most recent findings suggest that autistic people have a very wide range of empathetic responses, depending on the individual, the context, and who they are (or are not) empathizing with.

Some autistic people do say they have trouble empathizing; others though say they have such strong empathetic responses that they actually experience them as pain. (This is the case for me, at least in certain situations. For example, I find it very difficult to watch a lot of sit com embarrassment comedy, because it makes me so uncomfortable.)

People don’t extend empathy to autistic people

Autistic people may have trouble picking up on certain social cues or may not be great at interpreting other’s emotional expression. That can make it seem in some situations that some autistic people are not empathetic. But just because someone expresses their emotions differently doesn’t mean they don’t feel. Arguing otherwise seems like (ahem) a failure of empathy.

This isn’t just a cute rhetorical reversal, unfortunately. The fact is that autistic people—like a lot of marginalized people—tend to be seen as outsiders and as abnormal, and are therefore regularly, and viciously, denied empathy. Those Rain Man close-ups of Raymond, which encourage you to wonder who he is, or if he is in fact anybody, emphasize emptiness and alienness.

The film was celebrated at the time (and since) because it encouraged empathy with someone who was other, different, unknowable. But the flip side of that is that it sets up Raymond as other, different, unknowable. You are cued to see Raymond as distant and unreachable so that the triumph of reaching him is greater. When you frame autistic people as weird others who are difficult to love, at least some people are going to respond not by patting themselves on the back for impressive feats of love, but by just…not loving.

And sure enough, autistic people are often not loved, and not treated with empathy, by their peers. Autistic children are often bullied. Autistic adults are also targeted for workplace bullying, which at least one researcher believed might contribute to high rates of autistic unemployment. The same researcher notes that “autistic employees are also less likely to be believed while seeking a recourse, and less likely to receive empathy.” Autistic people are also often more affected by bullying, and less likely to be believed when they report being bullied.

Empathy can make people less kind

I’ve talked before about ways in which empathy can be used to define in-groups and out-groups and to legitimize bigotry. I think this is another example. Autistic people are defined as lacking empathy. Then that lack of empathy is used to justify refusing them empathy and treating them as outsiders who deserve bullying and wore than bullying (one study found that 90% of autistic women had been targets of sexual violence or assault.)

Often we think of empathy as a way to bridge difference; you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and then, ideally, you will treat them more kindly. But the way empathy has been weaponized against autistic people suggests that this is not always how things work. Instead, empathy in the experience of autistic people often functions as a way to reject difference and justify cruelty.

Autistic people do not perform empathy correctly, and that makes them targets. Empathy, in this formulation, isn’t about putting yourself in someone else’s position. Rather, empathy is a certain kind of negotiation, in which people demonstrate that they are part of an in-group through the performance of certain kinds of similarity. People tell each other—verbally or otherwise—that they are part of the same community of feeling. If you are in the community, then you are human. If you aren’t, then you aren’t, and the gloves come off.

This is why Hollywood films that are supposed to engender empathy are very careful to demonstrate fellow feeling as reciprocal and rewarded. There is always a scene where the white guy receives a nod of respect/acknowledgement from some colonized other, or a moment (or multiple moments as in Schindler’s List) when the oppressed people line up to declare their gratitude. Empathy is not for the other unless the other reciprocates.

Autistic people, though, are framed as being unable to reciprocate. There is, in public stereotypes of autistic people, no other person there to feel back at you, or to feel with you. Nor does this apply only to autistic people. Black people, too, face stereotypes that they are unable to feel pain. Immigrants who don’t speak the language or have different social norms may not jump through the right empathy hoops or may not express gratitude in the right way. (Dina Nayeri, an Iranian refugee in London, writes about how her classmates held her down and slammed her finger in a door, severing the tip of her finger.)

Whose empathy?

I’m not saying that empathy is always in every case an excuse for bullying or for denying people’s humanity. I just think that, when talking about autism, it’s important to be very careful about treating empathy as a sacrament or as a guarantor of humanity. Insisting that empathy is what makes you a good person has historically been used to deny autistic people—and not just autistic people—sympathy and even selfhood.

Given the potential downsides of empathy, it might be worth asking how we can imagine solidarity, or virtue, or kindness, if we put empathy aside. How do you treat people well without imagining that you are them, or without believing that your differences can be overcome through an act of self-projection? What if, instead of empathizing with people, we asked them what they felt or what they needed or wanted from us? What if we just tried to treat people well whether or not we could feel their pain?

I don’t think there’s any one surefire way, with empathy or without, to behave kindly or virtuously in every instance. I do know this, though: autistic people would be better off if empathy, or obvious displays of empathy, were not conflated with virtue. I think many neurotypical people might be better off as well.

Before you go

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