Simon Baron-Cohen > Quotes

“Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

“empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.”
― simon baron-cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

“I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

“The challenge is to explain, without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil, how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another. So let’s substitute the term “evil” with the term “empathy erosion.” Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

“We all know the kinds of short-term states we can enter that can compromise our empathy. These include being drunk, tired, impatient, or stressed, during which we might say or do the wrong thing to someone else and later regret it. The feeling of regret is a sign of our empathy circuit coming back on, but the fact that we say or do the wrong thing is nevertheless—at that moment—a fluctuation in our empathy circuit.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

“part of what is needed is a theory not only of how we invent, but why we invent. Recall that Edison was inventing for the pure pleasure of inventing. He worked on many of his inventions, not to meet an unmet need, but just to see what happens and what’s possible. The Systemizing Mechanism is what drives curiosity.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention

“The combination of low empathizing and high systemizing abilities might mean a rapid ascent of a man to the top of the social pile. This is because men in every culture compete against each other for success in social rank. As we mentioned above, a male’s position in the social dominance hierarchy in most species directly affects his fertility. For example, in some species it is only the alpha male that gets to reproduce. And even today, among modern humans, men with higher social status tend to have more children and more wives, compared with men of lower social status. To achieve social dominance, males use physical force, or the threat of force, or other kinds of threat (for example, withdrawing support). That is why, in most species, males are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than females.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“Some tasks that require good systemizing, such as tracking animals or inventing a new tool, take a long time. They might take days, months, or years. Many such tasks benefit from a lack of distraction and lots of hard concentration, preferably in solitude.
So it might be that even if you were good at systemizing you might never accomplish anything great if you were also good at empathizing, since you might then have an equally strong drive to socialize. But supposing you were low on empathizing. You might then be content to lock yourself away for days without much conversation, to focus long and deep on the system that was your current project. In pre-industrial societies this could involve fixing old axe-heads, or perhaps a four-day trek into the forest in search of food for your family (this might be the ancestral equivalent of the modern day pilot). The pay-off from not needing people as much as others do could be great”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“When our empathy is switched off, we are solely in the “I” mode. In such a state we relate only to things or to people as if they were just things. Most of us are capable of doing this occasionally”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

“Other reasons have been postulated for why Neanderthals died out, but my contention is that the combination of the new Systemizing Mechanism, enabling complex tool-making, and the Empathy Circuit, enabling complex social interaction and deception, led Homo sapiens to become unrivaled.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention

“Against this catalog of social difficulties, we must keep in mind that AS involves a different kind of intelligence. The strong drive to systemize means that the person with AS becomes a specialist in something, or even in everything they delve into. One man with AS in Denmark who I met put it this way: “You people [without AS] are generalists, content to know a little bit about a lot of subjects. We people [with AS] are specialists. Once we start to explore a subject, we do not leave it until we have gathered as much information as we can.” In effect, the systemizing drive in AS is often a drive to identify the underlying structure in the world.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“the hope is that laying out what we understand about essential differences in the minds of men and women may lead to grater acceptance and respect of difference.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“Systemizing and empathizing are wholly different kinds of processes. You use one process—empathizing—for making sense of an individual’s behavior, and you use the other—systemizing—for predicting almost everything else. To systemize you need detachment in order to monitor information and track which factors cause information to vary. To empathize you need some degree of attachment in order to recognize that you are interacting with a person, not an object, but a person with feelings, and whose feelings affect your own.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“We all value social relationships, but are there differences in what each sex values about other people? Women tend to value the development of altruistic, reciprocal relationships. Such relationships require good empathizing skills. In contrast, men tend to value power, politics, and competition. This pattern is found across widely different cultures and historical periods, and is even found among chimpanzees.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“How to score your AQ: Score one point for each of the following items if you answered ‘Definitely agree’ or ‘slightly agree’: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 33, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46. Score one point for each of the following items if you answered ‘Definitely disagree’ or ‘slightly disagree’: 3, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50. Simply add up all the points you have scored and obtain your total AQ score. How to interpret your AQ score 0 - 10 = low.    11 - 22 = average. (Most women score about 15 and most men score about 17). 23 - 31 = above average.    32 - 50 = very high. (Most people with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism score about 35). 50 = Maximum.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“Stereotyping reduces individuals to an average, whereas science recognizes that many people fall outside the average range for their group.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain

“The Broader Autism Phenotype: parents and siblings (who are first-degree relatives) show mild echoes of autism, sometimes referred to as the Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP). This might take the form of being socially withdrawn or confused by social interaction, or mildly obsessive (in the sense of having strong narrow interests or a need for sameness) or having excellent attention to detail and remarkable memory. Although they don’t have autism or Asperger sydrome itself, they have a milder manifestation of the same characteristics.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“Autism Society of America”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“In one unusual study, people were asked to classify over a hundred examples of local specimens into related species. The people who took part in this experiment were the Aguaruna, a tribal people living in the forest in northern Peru. The following results were found: men’s classification systems had more sub-categories (in other words, they introduced greater differentiation) and more consistency. More striking, the criteria that the Aguaruna men used to decide which animals belonged together more closely resembled the taxonomic criteria used by Western (mostly male) biologists.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“That is, the original hope that they could replace the subjective opinion of the doctor has not turned out to be the case, because they miss some cases of Asperger syndrome. They are also less useful for the assessment of adults, though there are some standardized methods available for this purpose, such as the Adult Asperger Assessment (AAA). The Diagnostic Instrument for Social and Communication Disorders (DISCO) is another useful alternative, developed by Dr Lorna Wing.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“Social Stories method developed by Carol Gray”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“many people with Asperger syndrome dream of a planet where they are the only human being, where there are no interruptions, where events happen with regularity and predictability. Many pine for the lifestyles that were adopted by monks in monasteries, where a calm tranquility allowed for routines in domestic life combined with solitary work.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“According to Laura Betzig, in the first civilizations (ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztec, the Inca, imperial India, and China), “powerful men mate with hundreds of women, pass their power on to a son by one legitimate wife, and take the lives of men who get in their way.” As I explained earlier, these men may have been powerful because they were good systemizers. The fact that they eliminated those who stood up to them implies that they were also low empathizers. And they certainly seemed to have an efficient means of disseminating their genes (polygyny). So we can envision how the genotype for brain type S might have spread widely throughout a male population.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“Italian neuroscientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma...”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty