Simon Baron-Cohen

Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen (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.

Baron-Cohen has worked in autism research for over 40 years, starting in 1982.

In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mindblindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995.

In 1985, while he was member of the Cognitive Development Unit (CDU) in London, he and his colleagues Uta Frith and Alan Leslie formulated the "theory of mind" (ToM) hypothesis, to explain the social-communication deficits in autism.

ToM (also known as "cognitive empathy") is the brain's partially innate mechanism for rapidly making sense of social behavior by effortlessly attributing mental states to others, enabling behavioral prediction and social communication skills.

They confirmed this using the false belief test, showing that a typical four-year-old child can infer another person's belief that is different to their own, while autistic children on average are impaired in this ability.

Baron-Cohen's 1995 book, Mindblindness summarized his subsequent experiments in ToM and the disability in ToM in autism.

He went on to show that autistic children are blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes and show deficits in advanced ToM, measured by the "reading the mind in the eyes test" (or "eyes test") that he designed.

He conducted the first neuroimaging study of ToM in typical and autistic adults, and studied patients demonstrating lesions in the orbito- and medial-prefrontal cortex and amygdala can impair ToM.

He also reported the first evidence of atypical amygdala function in autism during ToM.

In 1997, he formulated the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015.

In 1997, Baron-Cohen developed the empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory which proposes that humans can be classified on the basis of their scores along two dimensions (empathizing and systemizing).

Empathizing includes both cognitive empathy (imagining what someone else is thinking or feeling) and affective empathy (responding with an appropriate emotion to what someone is thinking or feeling).

Systemizing is the drive to analyse or construct rule-based systems to understand how things work.

A system is defined as anything that follows if-and-then patterns or rules.

The E-S theory argues that typical females on average score higher on empathizing relative to systemizing (they are more likely to have a brain of type E), and typical males on average score higher on systemizing relative to empathizing (they are more likely to have a brain of type S).

Autistic people are predicted to score as an extreme of the typical male (they are more likely to have a brain of type S or extreme type S).

In 2003, he formulated the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory of autism and typical sex differences, the key test of which was published in 2018.

He has also made major contributions to research on autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and vulnerability, autism intervention and synaesthesia.

Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to people with autism.

Baron-Cohen was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London, the second son of Judith and Hyman Vivian Baron-Cohen.

He completed a BA in human sciences at New College, Oxford, and an MPhil in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

He received a PhD in psychology at University College London; his doctoral research was in collaboration with his supervisor Uta Frith.

Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.

He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS), the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Association for Psychological Science.

He is a BPS Chartered Psychologist and a Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

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 and president of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR).

He is co-editor in chief of the journal Molecular Autism.

He was the chair of the Psychology Section of the British Academy.

He is also a clinical psychologist who has created a diagnosis clinic in the UK for late autism diagnosis in adults.

Baron-Cohen gave the keynote lecture on the topic of Autism and Human Rights at the United Nations on World Autism Awareness Day in 2017.

In 2017, his team studied 80K genotyped individuals who took the eyes test.

He found single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) partly contribute to individual differences on this dimensional trait measure on which autistic people are impaired.

This was the evidence that cognitive empathy/ToM is partly heritable.

The National Institutes of Health recommended Baron-Cohen's eyes test as a core measure that should be used as part of the Research Domain Criteria (RDOC) for assessing social cognition.

These predictions were confirmed in a 2018 online study of 600,000 non-autistic people and 36,000 autistic people.

This also confirmed that autistic people on average are “hyper-systemizers”.