Discovered in 2021, they’re the most cunning of the dark triads as they have the cognitive empathy that narcissists and psychopaths lack and this makes them the most manipulative and destructive individuals you could meet.
Maybe the confusion is in things called empathy. One of them autistic people lack, another of them psychopaths and (true, as opposed to pseudo-narcissism one can find among autistic people) narcissists lack.
What you describe seems to be psychopaths. Or you mean some kind of people able to fully feel what psychopaths can’t, but turn it off as needed? I dunno.
Autistic people don’t lack empathy. I learned that as a kid too and it was a real barrier to getting diagnosed, because there are few qualities I more obviously possess than empathy.
Autistic people and allistic people use different signals to show their emotional state, so it’s easier for autistic people to interpret the emotions of fellow autistic people (and vice versa).
Autistic people lack cognitive empathy, which is the ability to read minds to see what other people are thinking.
That’s not true, they can infer emotions with similar accuracy from the nonverbal communication of other autistic people. The double empathy problem prevents this from happening between autistic and allistic people (in both directions!)
Cognitive empathy isn’t about emotions.
True, I thought that’s what you meant by mind reading. Nevertheless, from the linked article:
This theory and subsequent findings challenge the commonly held belief that the social skills of all autistic individuals are inherently and universally impaired across contexts, as well as the theory of “mind-blindness” proposed by prominent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen in the mid-1990s, which suggested that empathy and theory of mind are universally impaired in autistic individuals.[13][14][15][16]
Of course. The theory of mind stuff is all thoroughly debunked, and drag is proof an autistic person can have strong cognitive empathy. Drag is talking about averages, which in drag’s opinion are derived from social isolation in childhood and lack of passive learning ability due to attentional focus. Drag doesn’t think impairments in cognitive empathy are driven by a fundamental misunderstanding. Rather, it’s unfamiliarity. Cognitive empathy is a skill that autistic people are presented with fewer opportunities to practice.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00791/full
To fulfill the objective, the meta-analysis was performed on 35 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria with the help of the Meta-essentials, which is a free excel meta-analysis tool that facilitates the integration of effect sizes from various studies. The results indicated that the ASD group differs significantly from typically developing (TD) group in both cognitive and affective empathy. The effect size for cognitive empathy was very large (1.26), whereas, for affective empathy, the effect size was medium (0.58). Further, there was a significant moderating effect of the type of measure used on cognitive empathy. However, there are a few limitations of the present meta-analysis.
