Simon Baron-Cohen

Writing for the Autism Society of America, Jill Escher has criticized Simon Baron-Cohen's support for neurodiversity, claiming that many autistic people lack basic life skills and will need lifelong care because of autism, not because of comorbid conditions. In August 2018, Baron-Cohen criticized the Twitter hashtag #EndAutismNow, describing it as hate speech and eugenics, while comparing it to the goals of the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Jonathan Ferguson, writing in The Times of Israel, responded that it is inappropriate for Baron-Cohen to compare advocates for an autism cure to the Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan.

His theories have been described by psychologist Cordelia Fine as "neurosexism". The 2017 book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini develops a "take-down" of the sex differences research from Baron-Cohen and his colleagues, who carry on Darwin's "idea that man and woman...evolved to meet their roles of hunter and gatherer, respectively."

He serves as Vice-President of the National Autistic Society (UK), and was the 2012 Chairman of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guideline Development Group for adults with autism. He has served as Vice-President of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR). He is co-editor in chief of the journal Molecular Autism. He is President-Elect of INSAR.

Baron-Cohen has faced criticism by some for his "empathizing-systemizing theory", which states that humans may be classified on the basis of their scores along two dimensions (empathizing and systemizing); and that females tend to score higher on the empathizing dimension and males tend to score higher on the systemizing dimension. Columnist at The Guardian Madeleine Bunting summarized some of these aspects in the 2010 article "The truth about sex difference is that if men are from Mars, so are women". Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences characterized The Essential Difference as "very disappointing" with a "superficial notion of intelligence", concluding that Baron-Cohen's major claims about mind-blindness and systemizing–empathizing are "at best, dubious".

A 2009 study led by Baron-Cohen which reported that autistic individuals possessed superior visual acuity has been subject to heavy criticism. The developers of the software he used said that his results were impossible based on the technology used in the study. Additionally, the results of the study could not be replicated in a follow-up study.

Baron-Cohen's work in systemising-empathising led him to investigate whether higher levels of fetal testosterone explain the increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among males; his theory is known as the "extreme male brain" theory of autism. A review of his book The Essential Difference published in Nature in 2003 summarises his proposal as: "the male brain is programmed to systemize and the female brain to empathize ... Asperger's syndrome represents the extreme male brain".

Baron-Cohen developed the Mindreading software for special education, which was nominated for an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) interactive award in 2002. His lab developed The Transporters, an animation series designed to teach children with autism to recognise and understand emotions. The series was also nominated for a BAFTA award.

In 2001 he developed the autism-spectrum quotient, a set of fifty questions that can be used to help determine whether or not an adult exhibits symptoms of autism. The AQ has subsequently been used in hundreds of studies including one study of half a million people, showing robust sex differences and higher scores in those who work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

In 1997 Baron-Cohen developed the empathising–systemising theory. His theory is that a cognitive profile with a systemising drive that is stronger than empathising is associated with maths, science and technology skills, and exists in families with autism spectrum disorders. He suspects that if individuals with a "systemising" focus are selecting each other as mates, they are more likely to have children with autism. He postulates that more individuals with autistic traits are marrying each other and having children. He said that "In essence, some geeks may be carriers of genes for autism: in their own life, they do not demonstrate any signs of severe autism, but when they pair up and have kids, their children may get a double dose of autism genes and traits. In this way, assortative mating between technical-minded people might spread autism genes."

Baron-Cohen was awarded the 1990 Spearman Medal from the BPS, the McAndless Award from the American Psychological Association, the 1993 May Davidson Award for Clinical Psychology from the BPS, and the 2006 presidents' Award from the BPS. He was awarded the Kanner-Asperger Medal in 2013 by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft Autismus-Spektrum as a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to autism research.

He married Bridget Lindley, a family rights lawyer whom he had met at Oxford, in 1987. She died of breast cancer in 2016.

Baron-Cohen and his colleagues discovered in 1987 the first evidence that experiences in synaesthesia remain consistent over time; they also found synaesthesia to be measurable via neuroimaging techniques. His team has investigated whether synaesthesia is connected to autism.

While a member of the Cognitive Development Unit (CDU) in London in 1985, Baron-Cohen was lead author (with Alan M. Leslie and Uta Frith) of the first study proposing a correlation between children with autism and delays in the development of a theory of mind ("ToM"). A theory of mind is the ability to imagine other people's emotions and thoughts, and it is a skill that according to Baron-Cohen's research is typically delayed developmentally in children with autism.

Simon Baron-Cohen FBA FBPsS (born 15 August 1958) is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the University's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mind-blindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995. In 1997, he formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015. He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia. However, his views on autism and sex differences, such as the fetal sex steroid theory, are controversial, with some critics asserting that Baron-Cohen's theories are based on subjective perceptions.