What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People

"For decades, the media stereotyped autistic people as laughable or lost, while autism researchers described us as " less domesticated" than neurotypical people and compared us to apes and robots incapable of cultural learning. In 2022, a comprehensive survey found that 60 percent of autism researchers still used dehumanizing language in their work: Mechanical. Morally deficient. Incapable of empathy. Meanwhile, the actual data tells a radically different story."

"The claim: Autistic people lack empathy and caring toward others. The research problem: A 2025 meta-analysis of 226 studies involving more than 57,000 participants revealed that decades of "empathy deficit" research suffered from severe methodological flaws. The most commonly used empathy measure-the Empathy Quotient-was found to be bias-prone with insufficient psychometric quality, mixing items measuring actual empathy with items tapping social skills and communication style."

"The meta-analysis found that when considering only high-quality studies, the small difference in affective empathy (emotional response to others) became statistically nonsignificant. For decades, researchers had been measuring the wrong thing. Conflating communication style differences with empathy deficits produced dramatically inflated effect sizes and an illusion of empathy impairment. The behavioral evidence of caring: When researchers moved beyond flawed questionnaires to test actual empathic behavior, the results contradicted the defi"

For decades the media and some researchers depicted autistic people as laughable, less domesticated, or comparable to apes and robots. A 2022 survey found that 60 percent of autism researchers used dehumanizing language. A 2025 meta-analysis of 226 studies with more than 57,000 participants identified severe methodological flaws in decades of empathy-deficit research. The Empathy Quotient was bias-prone and conflated social-communication differences with empathy. High-quality studies showed no significant affective-empathy deficit. Behavioral measures of empathic action contradict prior claims. Autistic people often excel at verbal creativity and experience unique, deep joy. Bullying and lack of understanding and acceptance undermine wellbeing.

Read at Psychology Today