Simon Baron-Cohen

Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is a British psychologist and expert on autism. He's known for his theories about empathy.

Simon Baron-Cohen was born to a Jewish family in England, in 1958. When he was seven years old, his father told him about the Holocaust. Eleven years later, he went to Oxford to study human sciences. After graduating, he got a PhD in Psychology. In 1982, Dr. Baron-Cohen started studying autism.

In 1985, Dr. Baron-Cohen co-wrote a paper about theory of mind, which means understanding that another person can believe something that isn't true. He and his team said that most people have a theory of mind by the time they're four years old but that autistic people usually don't. He then studied autistic people to see if he were right and wrote a book called Mindblindness. He also married Bridget Lindley.

He then started writing about empathy. He said cognitive empathy is knowing what emotions other people feel and affective empathy is caring. Baron-Cohen wrote that there are people who are better with understanding objects and how they work than they are at understanding feelings. He called them systemizers. Baron-Cohen said that men are usually better systemizers than women and women are usually better empathizers than men. He also said that autistic people are usually better systemizers than people who aren't autistic and people who aren't autistic are usually better empathizers than autistic people. Baron-Cohen said that you could even call autism "the extreme male brain."

He then wrote a book called Prenatal Testosterone in Mind, trying to explain why there are more autistic men than there are autistic women.

Baron-Cohen then helped create a cartoon TV show called The Transporters to teach autistic kids how to recognize emotions in people's faces.

Dr. Baron-Cohen then wrote a book about the difference between Asperger syndrome (which was once called autistic psychopathy) and psychopathy. He said that autistic people had zero-positive empathy meaning they couldn't tell what other people were feeling but if you told them what someone else was feeling then they'd feel the way they should about it. He also said Psychopaths had zero-negative empathy meaning that they knew what other people's feelings were but didn't care. He said the way to explain the Nazis (and other people like them) doing bad things wasn't that they were evil but that they didn't have enough empathy. He also said that the word "evil" should be replaced with the phrase "empathy erosion." In England, his book was called Zero Degrees of Empathy but in North America, it was called The Science of Evil.

In 2021, Baron-Cohen was knighted for helping people with autism.