Contrary to the theory that neurological sex differences and autism both involve the same tradeoff of systemic versus empathic thinking, I found complex differences. It turned out that men were more interested in technology and more disagreeable, whereas autistic people had a narrower focus on details, were more introverted, more socially challenged, and had stronger sensory sensitivity.
I agree with your conclusion that the extreme male brain hypothesis is not very convincing. However, a slightly modified version of this hypothesis seems quite likely to me: that autism shifts traits in directions where males on average have higher scores than females. This would explain the prevalence of males in the mildest forms of autism, those associated with common variants, as opposed to the more severe forms of autism associated with rare de novo variants.
Kind of yeah. My study is specifically addressing the Empathy/Systemizing quotient, rather than the notion of there being a correlation. Because I explicitly recruited equally many men and women, I was guaranteed to end up with autism and sex being statistically independent in my sample, but generally the male-typical and autist-typical profiles were somewhat overlapping in my data, and in the general population men are more likely to be diagnosed with autism, so it does seem like there is a correlation.
But there are still gaps where one could imagine that this is distorted. For instance, the autistic women in my study had somewhat more male-typical interests in a way that wasn't reflected among the men, nor by the correlation of the scales among allists. That could be due to a diagnostic bias, where women are not diagnosed with autism unless they are also masculine in ways that are really unrelated to autism. I don't think this finding is a fluke since I found it in other studies I've done too.
But overall, my study was not so centrally optimized to figure this out, so I don't really know.
Anecdotally, my personal impression is that difficulties in contextualising (which is of course related to the "detail interest" axis you showed) is a major feature of autism. I wonder what you think of John Nerst's contextualiser/decoupler dichotomy? It was proposed for ordinary people, but I wonder if it measures something similar to your "detail interest" axis? It is presented in brief in the link below.
Finally, if there is indeed a link between "detail interest" and "contextualiser", because in humans context is very social, could it help to link the two different parts of autism, the one about social challenges and the one about detail focus?
Super interesting, thanks for the post!
I agree with your conclusion that the extreme male brain hypothesis is not very convincing. However, a slightly modified version of this hypothesis seems quite likely to me: that autism shifts traits in directions where males on average have higher scores than females. This would explain the prevalence of males in the mildest forms of autism, those associated with common variants, as opposed to the more severe forms of autism associated with rare de novo variants.
I have to admit I didn't follow all the statistical nuances, so this might be a dumb question
As far as I know, there is a larger percentage of autistic people among males; doesn't that by itself imply a correlation?
Kind of yeah. My study is specifically addressing the Empathy/Systemizing quotient, rather than the notion of there being a correlation. Because I explicitly recruited equally many men and women, I was guaranteed to end up with autism and sex being statistically independent in my sample, but generally the male-typical and autist-typical profiles were somewhat overlapping in my data, and in the general population men are more likely to be diagnosed with autism, so it does seem like there is a correlation.
But there are still gaps where one could imagine that this is distorted. For instance, the autistic women in my study had somewhat more male-typical interests in a way that wasn't reflected among the men, nor by the correlation of the scales among allists. That could be due to a diagnostic bias, where women are not diagnosed with autism unless they are also masculine in ways that are really unrelated to autism. I don't think this finding is a fluke since I found it in other studies I've done too.
But overall, my study was not so centrally optimized to figure this out, so I don't really know.
Anecdotally, my personal impression is that difficulties in contextualising (which is of course related to the "detail interest" axis you showed) is a major feature of autism. I wonder what you think of John Nerst's contextualiser/decoupler dichotomy? It was proposed for ordinary people, but I wonder if it measures something similar to your "detail interest" axis? It is presented in brief in the link below.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms
Finally, if there is indeed a link between "detail interest" and "contextualiser", because in humans context is very social, could it help to link the two different parts of autism, the one about social challenges and the one about detail focus?