03/08/2025
A great and well written read by ADHDventures.
Concerning: Simon Baron-Cohen
I’ve had a lot of people quote Simon Baron-Cohen to me lately, often using his credentials to dismiss autistic lived experience. In that light, I felt compelled to share some thoughts (and these are not merely my thoughts) on why his continued influence is so concerning.
When I was a psychology undergraduate, Simon Baron-Cohen was required reading. His theories were central to my studies, and he was recognised as the foremost authority on autism. He shaped much of the mainstream thinking, and still has a profound impact on how we’re seen by the world.
He’s best known for promoting the Theory of Mind deficit, the idea that autistic people can’t understand others’ thoughts or emotions, and the Extreme Male Brain theory, which tries to explain autism as an exaggeration of stereotypical male traits.
both theories frame autism as a deficit and have been widely criticised for reinforcing gendered stereotypes that marginalise autistic women and ignore lived experience.
He never listened to autistic people to develop these theories - he focused his attention on a (homogenous, gender-exclusive) group of autistic people, spit balled some thoughts about why they were so “broken”, and has continued to regurgitate that for more than 3 decades.
Even as an undergrad, his theories didn’t sit right with me. I just didn’t yet have the understanding to explain why they were so fundamentally flawed. I know now that the reason is his biased perspective; his theories are all deficit-based. His studies are built around observations from the outside looking in, with neuronormative behaviour as the standard and any deviation framed as a deficit, as degrees away from the right kind of brain.
Simon Baron-Cohen’s work builds on, and seeks to explain, the Triad of Impairments (Wing & Gould, 1979), which defines autism as involving deficits in three key areas: social interaction, social communication, and imagination.
This narrow, biased perspective fails to acknowledge that many of these so-called “impairments” emerge from being autistic brains being forced to exist in environments that are inaccessible, unaccommodating, and harmful. It’s like saying a sunflower is deficient in growing capability because it wilts in the Sahara.
Now to be clear, I’m not criticising him for not knowing what we know now. When he published much of this work, concepts like monotropism, sensory integration, and the double empathy problem hadn’t yet gained mainstream recognition. The issue isn’t not knowing then; it’s that he knows NOW and yet still clings to these outdated theories. He has disregarded better, more inclusive understanding as it has emerged because it doesn’t validate his own flawed research.
The double empathy problem, for example, shows that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people go both ways. Yet Baron-Cohen’s work continues to place the full burden on autistic people, that autistic people are deficient in communication because we lack Theory of Mind. His work continues to ignore that neurotypical people struggle to understand autistic people as frequently as autistic people struggle to understand neurotypical people; it continues to ignore that autistic-to-autistic communication tends to be far more effective than neurotypical-to-neurotypical communication. Regardless of the data, he continues to treat autistic communication norms as being deficits rather than differences.
Why does this matter? Because his work has helped define how autistic people have been perceived for decades. It was highly influential in defining the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV, influenced education and therapy approaches. It has shaped mainstream media portrayals. He is viewed as the expert (despite his own lack of scientific rigour) because he talked about autism when no one else did, and when absolutely no one thought to speak to the actually autistic people. More recently, he led the Spectrum 10K genetic study, which sparked huge backlash due to ethical concerns and a complete lack of autistic involvement - again, excluding us from our own narrative. The study has since been cancelled, but the damage to trust remains. (It’s simple, Simon: Nothing about us, without us.)
You might ask, “Why judge SBC so harshly?” After all, Freud was wrong about a lot, and we still credit him for shaping the field. But Freud evolved, and importantly, he acknowledged when he was wrong. That’s the difference. With what we now understand about monotropism, the double empathy problem, sensory processing, and the massive impact of environmental factors, the flaws in his work are clear. But he doesn’t acknowledge that. He is complicit in allowing harmful and outdated information to define how the world sees us, not simply for the research he did, but for refusing to revise it in light of new knowledge.
His work treats autistic people like puzzles to be solved, rejecting the complexity and fullness of the internal autistic experience. You might ask, “How much harm could that be doing?” A LOT. Because his theories are still used to underpin autism interventions in education and mental health. And they still influence how we’re portrayed in mainstream media - stigmatising, isolating, dehumanising portrayals. Baron-Cohen gave the world the “Extreme Male Brain” theory, and in return, we get characters like The Good Doctor — analytical, emotionally distant, robotic, devoid of humanness until filled with “normality” by the neurotypical people who take pity on the poor broken soul. His comments and musings are taken as fact and used against autistic people all the time. His depiction of autistic women as unfeeling has been highly influential in autistic women being denied custody of their children in the UK. Following seeing new data (by other-less-biased researchers) he posted on Twitter to say it showed that “Sometimes, autistic women can even be good mothers” (yes, he actually said that) - an opinion then reshared widely across social media to validate the view that autistic women shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.
This barely scratches the surface of the harm he’s caused. The most damaging thing isn’t that he got it wrong before, it’s that, in the face of overwhelming rejection from the people he claims to represent, he steadfastly refuses to let go now of the theories that built his career.
And, really, this is the heart of the problem with SBC - he is in the exceptionally privileged position of being a world-renowned academic with the power to shape public perception, a power he could use to make sure autistic voices are heard. Instead, continues to climb on the backs of autistic people to push himself higher; he uses our community as the pedestal upon which he places himself to be admired. Despite widespread rejection of his theories by the neurodivergent community, and even significant criticism from his peers, SBC clings to the same deficit-based narrative, perpetuating the idea that autistic people are less, that our communication style is deficient, and that we need to be fixed. In science terms, he actively disregards relevant first-hand data (autistic peoples’ accounts of internal experience) in favor of relying on second-hand observations. Why would he do this? Because the quality first-hand data disproves his hypotheses and to acknowledge it would be to dislodge himself from being central to the discussion.
It’s just objectively bad science.
And it tells you everything you need to know about how he views us.
This might all sound like it’s personal for me. Yes, this is personal. His refusal to acknowledge the flaws in his theories harms autistic people every day. His refusal to centre autistic voices harms autistic people every day. He declared himself the leading expert on being autistic without ever seeing autistic people as humans; it would be like Data on ST:TNG declaring itself an expert on human emotional regulation based on observations and then telling all the humans that they’re broken if their experiences don’t match his expectations.
To be very, very clear: autistic people do not lack empathy. We’re not broken versions of “normal.” We’re not failing to manage our deficits effectively.
We are neurodivergent - different, not less than - and we deserve research and representation that reflects that.
Thankfully, there are autistic researchers, writers, and advocates doing that work — shaping a future grounded in lived experience, not just clinical theory.
If you’re looking to grow your understanding of the autistic experience — especially if you’re studying psychology or working with autistic people — please don’t look to Simon Baron-Cohen for anything beyond historical context. His work may have shaped where we’ve come from, but it does not represent where we’re going.
I’ll be compiling a list of books and sources on autism, masking, neurodivergence, and monotropism, and pinning it in the comments.
It’s gotten later than I planned, so that’ll likely go up tomorrow.
If you’re still here, thanks for reading.
— John
Emergent Divergence: The neurodivergent ramblings of David Gray-Hammond
The Autistic Advocate
