Many autistic people lack cognitive empathy– the ability to accurately understand other people’s emotional states. We might have a hard time telling from someone’s face whether they’re happy or sad, predicting whether a blunt statement of “your hat is very ugly” would be read as an insult, figuring out what sort of present another person would want for Christmas, or saying something that would comfort someone going through a hard time.
In my experience, a lot of adult autistic people develop what you might call “cold” cognitive empathy, in contrast to the “hot” cognitive empathy non-autistic people usually have. Hot cognitive empathy is an intuitive sense: you look at someone and just know that they’re sad, you easily grasp that calling someone’s hat ugly is an insult, and you see a present and can easily recognize that it’s the perfect present for another person. Conversely, cold cognitive empathy is rational and deliberate. If you have cold cognitive empathy, you might have certain rules: for instance, you might pick a Christmas present by listing out all the things the person likes and what they might need, or you might comfort someone by fetching them tea and offering them a hug. You might deliberately put yourself into their shoes, imagining what you would feel like in that situation: “well, her dog just died, and I would be sad if someone I cared about died, so I bet she’s sad.” I tend to think about people’s personalities the same way I’d think about what a fictional character wants and how they’d react to things, but then I spent a lot of time writing fanfic as a teenager.
(If you’re familiar with the terminology, hot cognitive empathy corresponds to System 1, while cold cognitive empathy corresponds to System 2.)
Of course, a person can develop both hot cognitive empathy and cold cognitive empathy. But I think having severely impaired hot cognitive empathy is a spur that makes people develop their cold cognitive empathy more strongly.
I feel like cold cognitive empathy can give you a lot of insight into how society works. A person with well-developed hot cognitive empathy, when asked something like “why do people like wearing band shirts?”, says “uh, because they’re cool”. A person with well-developed cold cognitive empathy says “because they’re indirectly communicating to others that they like the band”. A person with well-developed hot cognitive empathy, when asked why one shouldn’t proposition strangers, says “it’s creepy”; a person with well-developed cold cognitive empathy says “engaging in behavior that it is generally off-limits, particularly in a sexual context, communicates to other people that you don’t care about boundaries– including more important ones like ‘don’t rape people.'”
I also think that cold cognitive empathy works better for dealing with diverse groups of people. People with high levels of hot cognitive empathy and low levels of cold cognitive empathy, in my experience, tend to fall into this failure mode where, when people don’t behave the way they predict, they assume the person is behaving the way they predict anyway. If they misread a person as being sad, then that person must secretly be sad, however much that person protests otherwise. If they think a person wants chocolate for Christmas, then that person must want chocolate, no matter how often the chocolate sits in the back of the cabinet unopened. Some people wind up having entire relationships with fictional people that bear only a passing resemblance to the actual person they believe they’re interacting with. Cold cognitive empathy, because it’s conscious and rational, is more open to deliberate correction when one discovers that it is in error.
The big problem with cold cognitive empathy is that hot cognitive empathy deals with a lot of complexities in human interaction subconsciously, where the person doesn’t have to think about them. Representing all those complexities consciously through a process of rational deliberation is really hard. Think about it like throwing a ball: your brain is doing a bunch of subconscious trigonometry to figure out what angle to throw it at, which you don’t have access to. You might not even know how to do trig. If you had to calculate it all yourself, throwing balls would take a really long time and you probably wouldn’t be any good at it.
It doesn’t help that– since most people have fairly high levels of hot cognitive empathy and don’t bother to develop cold cognitive empathy to as high a degree– a lot of explanations of why people do things are really unsatisfying. Imagine if you were talking to a hypothetical alien who had to do trig to throw balls, and you were giving advice like “just look at your target!” or “I don’t know, I just throw it.” That’s the reason that a lot of neurotypicals wind up explaining why you shouldn’t do things with such non-explanations as “that’s wrong”, “that’s creepy”, “that’s impolite”, “that’s lame” and so on. Their brains are doing really complicated game theory and psychology and such on a level that they don’t have access to.
Because most people tend not to accept unsatisfying explanations, you get the stereotypical autistic behavior of going “it’s this way because neurotypicals are STUPID and IRRATIONAL and DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE and EVERYONE SHOULD STOP.” While that’s sometimes true, it’s often simply a failure of cold cognitive empathy.
Thing of Things 
I wonder whether you read Egan’s Distress and if so, what do you think of his take on empathy and autism?
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Oh man, I loved that book. Egan is great.
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Yes, also the anthropocosmologists are eerily similar to LessWrong / MIRI, even though the book was written before either existed (!)
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See also: the PUA idea of the “natural”
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Always worth remmebering… http://lesswrong.com/lw/hlk/rationality_quotes_june_2013/937u
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Failure mode (mine anyway) of cold cognitive empathy: Constant iteration on “am I getting this right?”, “is this person really feeling how I think they’re feeling?”, “does this person actually like me, or are they just pretending to like me for *incomprehensible neurotypical reasons*?”.
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I’m reliably told that I’m not autistic, and I have a decent “hot” understanding of emotional expressions and an intuitive awareness that calling people’s attire ugly is likely to be taken as a status attack in the absence of other context, but my gift-giving is entirely “cold,” to the point where I have trouble believing that this is ordinarily part of a set of related intuitions. My impression from talking to other non-autistic people about it is that intuitive gift-buying is at best a much less common thing than just not being autistic; at worst belief in its existence is a collective misunderstanding of how other people typically approach the issue — an atypical mind fallacy.
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Seconded. I find gift-buying hard.
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I know people who use their “hot” empathy to pick out gifts. They see something and become instantly convinced it is completely perfect as a present for someone. Usually if you give them time to reflect before they buy the gift their cold mode will kick in and they’ll start to realize the gift might not be perfect.
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I can find gifts in a way that’s “hot,” but only after I had a “cold” insight– that the real purpose of a gift isn’t the object or service given, but the social signal that it sends, and that for most ordinary sorts of relationships, the appropriate signal is usually something like “I have been paying attention to your tastes and preferences.”
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I buy gifts in a “hot” way but it only works on people I am close to (family and SO, pretty much.) It does work well on them and I’m pretty good at getting people things they didn’t know they wanted but are very happy to own.
This sub thread is interesting. I’m going to consciously start thinking about the social signalling component when I intuitively buy gifts for people I’m less close to, now.
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This is very useful.
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I think the strongest part of this post is the bit about cold cognitive empathy working better with diversity. I’m not autistic, and I have (probably) an above-average “hot cognitive empathy” skillset (I’m a good poker player)- but despite that, I still use “cold” empathy day-to-day far more often than that would suggest. “Hot” is really only useful when needing snap judgements (like in poker) or when dealing with extremely well-understood people (friends and family). In most of real life, you aren’t dealing with family, and you have the time to use “cold” techniques successfully.
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I definitely work on the “cold” model and I’m quite often running into situations where “oh dear, that person thought what I said was intentionally rude or offensive or hurtful when I thought I was clearly being humorous or not to be taken seriously”.
Figuring out “But how did X get heard as Y?” is difficult when you can’t access “but of course they think it’s rude” on instinct.
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I often have to explain something like this to my “normal” friends when they meet my “nerdy” friends. This is the best explanation I’ve seen so far: thanks! Now I can just point them here. There’s something else I’ve heard from certain of my “nerdy” friends, and I’m curious if this experience is common: some people will tell me that they get a “jump start” empathizing with certain experiences based on indirect intuitions, like for example hearing about something terrible happening to a human or an animal, putting themselves in its place, and then empathizing with others over minor things. Is this something you’ve experienced?
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“While that’s sometimes true, it’s often simply a failure of cold cognitive empathy.”
I’m having trouble parsing this bit. A failure on whose part, the autistics or the neurotypicals? Or do you mean it’s one way system 2 itself fails?
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As I understand it: The autistic person’s cold empathy is not always strong enough to work out the real reason/justification for a behaviour, and they may be too quick to jump from ‘I can’t see the point of this’ to ‘this has no point’. The neurotypical people are also responsible for this situation, though, because they tend to give unhelpful intuitive (hot) explanations. So in this scenario the autistic person’s cold empathy is failing them, and the neurotypical people are (probably) failing to apply cold empathy at all.
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That failure mode is basically “Breaking Chesterton’s Fence in the presence of bull”:
https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/mistakes-3-breaking-chestertons-fence-in-the-presence-of-bull/
Just because people give you stupid explanations for what they do doesn’t mean that there are no good explanations, or that doing something else is automatically better. I wouldn’t call it typical for cold-empathy-types per se, but rather typical for people with more Int than Wis (in D&D terms). It’s just that autistic types tend to have selectively low Wis in social situations, combined with good analytical intelligence.
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“That’s the reason that a lot of neurotypicals wind up explaining why you shouldn’t do things with such non-explanations as “that’s wrong”, “that’s creepy”, “that’s impolite”, “that’s lame” and so on. Their brains are doing really complicated game theory and psychology and such on a level that they don’t have access to.”
How do you know that is what their brains are doing? After all, we describe lots of things in complicated theories when the organisms involved in those things are absolutely not using such theories to support their behavior. Why should we assume that human behavior stems from theory, rather than merely being described by it?
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There’s no difference from the outside and we can’t access the inside.
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Huh. I’m about 70% sure I’m not autistic in any sense, but this is almost exactly how I relate to people.
Not sure what to infer from that.
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That there’s quite a wide spectrum to autism, from “slightly nerdy” to “literally Rain Man”. If the tendencies are small enough, nobody calls it autism. But it’s still a very specific type of weird, and a lot of the advice for more severe cases might be worth looking into. At least, that’s how I feel about it – YMMV.
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Maybe, maybe not. Lots of people go through their lives high functioning and don’t suffer many disadvantages. I’d only worry about it if you think it’s hurting your life and if there’s some way it could help to find out for sure.
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Given the assessment apparently runs at about $600 without rebates available, I think I’ll continue in ignorance. It would be nice, but I don’t need to know that badly.
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I once knew a nurse, lets call her Jane who worked in a neuro ward, they had a patient suffering from a particularly unpleasant condition which while not immediately deadly does paralyze most facial muscles and destroys their ability to express emotion and messes up their body language. Inside they’re the same as ever, outside they’re blank faced with few of the little movements and expressions that people normally project.
The patient kept telling Jane how Jane was the “nicest nurse on the ward”, how “all the others are horrible” which seemed odd because Jane knew that none of the other nurses had ever expressed strong feelings about this patient which they normally would do if a patient had pissed them off somehow.
It was a bit of a mystery until Jane happened to be in the room when another nurse was checking on the patients. Lets call her Carol
Carol with patient 1: light and cheery, “Oh how’re you feeling mr X, stomach alright..” etc etc etc
Carol with patient 2: light and cheery, “How’s the leg today… ” etc
Carol with the facial paralysis patient: *blank* *silent* *no eye contact*
Carol with patient 4: light and cheery, “Feeling better after the surgery? lets check that blood pressure” etc
Talking to the nurse she had no idea that she’d interacted any differently with the facial paralysis patient.
None.
She’d reacted to the body language of the facial paralysis patient without realizing it.
Most people are utterly unaware of their inputs and outputs, they’re just trundling through life on automatic.
This is what most people do most of the time. Faced with someone who doesn’t put out the right signals through no fault of their own they treat them horribly.
The other nurses were normal people. On the other hand Jane was… a little autistic. Social interaction something scripted and done consciously. Body language something to be noted consciously, not reacted to unconsciously.
Jane just followed the script and ignored the damaged body language because she knew about the patients condition… for which she was perceived as the “only nice nurse” because Jane just talked to the patient like any other human.
The facial paralysis condition doesn’t directly cause depression but it does correlate with a very high suicide rate because people suffering from it suddenly find that their friends don’t want to be around them and when they’re there they barely talk or interact with them. People they’ve known for years suddenly seem to hate them or feel uncomfortable around them. The friends weren’t horrible people, they just react on automatic.
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Anecdotal data point: I’ve run “cold” so long it’s automatic. (I trained myself to make facial expressions as a teenager, among other things. Now I do so without noticing, and have to counteract the habit when I wish to be opaque.)
But I required glasses from a very young age, and didn’t wear them until I was older. I had no facial expressions to go by as a child; facial expressions weren’t trained into me as something to react to. (I’d hazard a guess that having poor eyesight and a child, and having a “cold” cognitive empathy pattern, are very strongly correlated.)
As a result of being a “hotcold”, I run social situations on autopilot (a social version of muscle memory), but if asked, can tell somebody exactly what I was reacting to/noticing, and why. I suspect the difference between “hot” and “cold” is a combination of habit and language – “hot” people learn social interaction first, and have training without understanding. “Cold” people learn something like social theory (or at least the language to describe their interactions) first, and have understanding without training. But most “cold” people find social interaction painful/difficult, and never develop the proper habits/training to run on autopilot.
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I’m autistic, and feel that I have more cold cognitive empathy than hot, but was actually having a conversation today about how I tend to do the thing you described as hot empathy’s failure mode: I misread someone as sad, therefore they’re sad even if they say otherwise.
The thing is that I can intellectually know that a person isn’t sad, because they’re telling me so. But I also have a hard time really accounting for other minds outside my own, so even if someone says they’re not sad, I see Sadness Cues and get this strong “that can’t be right!” response that overwhelms what they’re actually saying.
It’s really annoying, and actually impacts my relationship with my wife a lot (hence the conversation, which is really a nice way of saying an argument), because no matter how much she tries to tell me that, yes, it’s okay if I infodump, or no, her more-dramatic-than-I-was-raised-with expressions of frustration don’t mean the end of the world just because that’s what they’d be if I were making them, I can’t internalise this at all. I just have this constant override of Typical Mindedness that I intellectually know isn’t true, but doesn’t affect how I act because no matter how much someone tells me “it’s not the end of the world”, my emotions are screaming “fix it! fix it! fix it!”
I would really like to learn how to overcome this.
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