[update, June 2, 6:01 pm EST) a previous version of this article cited data that mixed cognitive empathy with emotional empathy. This error has since been corrected]
A study proves what women have known and exploited for centuries: men are autistic.
A sample of over 670,000 individuals took a battery of tests and questionnaires measuring autism quotient, empathy quotient, systemizing quotient, and sensory perception quotient.

The most interesting find was that on the eye test, a measure of cognitive empathy (ability to read what others are thinking), neurotypical men scored 25.54 (SD 4.57) and neurotypical women scored 27.42 (SD 3.43). From this I estimated the sex-combined neurotypical mean and SD are 26.48 and 3.92, respectively. Converting the sex-combined mean and SD to the familiar IQ scale (mean 100, SD 15), we get the following hierarchy of social intelligence:
Neurotypical women: social IQ 104 (SD 13.13)
Neurotypical men: social IQ 96 (SD 17.5)
Autistic men: social IQ 89 (SD 25.4)
Autistic women: social IQ 88 (SD 27)
Autism can be defined as the hyper-masculinization of certain parts of the brain, and people exposed to more testosterone during a critical period of brain development are more likely to be autistic, according to Simon Barron Cohen.
Also interesting is the incredible variability in each of the groupings. Nearly the full range of social intelligence is found in both sexes and in both autistics and neurotypicals. Even some autistics will be social geniuses and even some female neurotypicals will be socially retarded.
But on average, neurotypical females are about 8 IQ points more socially intelligent than men, which makes sense because men evolved to be useful idiots who work 48 hours a week to provide for their wives who stay at home watching Oprah, and then taking half the man’s money in divorce, and live five years longer.
Because females (on average) lacked the spatial and logical IQ to hunt food and build shelter, they evolved the social IQ to find a man who could these things for them.
However it should be noted that because of their greater variance (at least in this study), we’d expect social geniuses to be more likely to be male than female.
What exactly is the empathizing quotient? Can it really be equated to social IQ?
It’s a type of social IQ. Ability to read people just from their eyes.
“Based on the findings about the psychometric properties of the EQ, there is evidence for the division of the EQ into three sub-categories (the three-factor model): cognitive empathy, emotional reactivity, and social skills.[2]”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_quotient#Revised_questionnaires
Is your “Social IQ”-score only based on cognitive empathy? Because then perhaps it should just be labeled “Cognitive Empathy IQ”?
I was citing data from a measure that failed to distinguish the two kinds of empathy. I’ve since corrected the article.
Ah, ok. I’m still not sure whether the eye test alone should be called social IQ, since the eye test correlates poorly with EQ, and EQ includes social skills. So isn’t EQ the “real” social IQ? Or some subset of EQ?
Also, are there gender differences in systematizing? Could be relevant to gender differences in science etc.
But EQ measures more than just social IQ. It also measures personality traits that are socially valued, but personality is different from cognition (IQ).
True. Would you include social skills as measured by EQ in Social IQ? In that case, 2 of the 3 subcategories of EQ are part of Social IQ. And yet it doesn’t correlate well with the eye test. So at least one of the two must be bad at measuring Social IQ.
Perhaps the Dunning-Kruger effect/desirability bias makes asking people directly about their social skills fairly useless.
Or perhaps the eye test isn’t that good.
I thought males are, on avg, more likely to be on anti-social personality spectrum, not just be more autists, even because there are plenty of males who lie about their real intentions to whatever stuff they are engaging-in.
Men are both autistic & psychopathic. Look at pill & mug of pee.
Ever and’ever. don’t confuse emotional with social intelligence. Social intelligence is a product of social intelligence, levels of self knowledge, self awareness, will power to adapt to given society while emotional intelligence is something more intrinsic. Seems…
Yup, 100% of wars in the world just proved thousand times that on avg, males are emotional and socially dumb, and it’s worse for THEM. Imagine many guys here in wars, hurting themselves, dying to make money to another guys, sons of piece of bitches.
Social intelligence is the ability to know what people are thinking & predict their behaviour
Nothing to do with will power. Will power is motivation
Someone can be socially intelligent but have no motivation to be liked
In other hand, systemizing is quasi-like a ”pattern recognition” nickname. Or not. I did this test on internet and the results were weird, i did horrible on systemizing as expected but equally bad on empathy. Remember that emphaty have the cognitive and the affective sides, and people on the anti-social spectrum tend to be better on cognitive empathy [or it seems]: read other behaviors/understand others than necessarily put themselves in another ”clothes”.
Social intelligence is the result of your levels of short to long term success in given society, period. Yes, you can born with potential to be socially sucessfull but bad circunstances can drop this potential to minimal expression.
In my view, on avg, males and females are equally worse to understand one each other, while they are obviously better to understand in-groups. But, females are better to engage on universal morality, the best model of ethical behavior, than males exactly because reduced impetus to competition, even i’m not saying no have competitive women or even no have any competitive culture among them, just both are lower than among men. Examples of females who are overrepresented on social causes abound.
And, men have better macro-circunstancial heuristic to understand… themselves, their legacy while historically dominant group in patriarchal societies, included the risks which can be caused by another men, example, the overrepresentation of them among ideological groups who opposed poorly defined moral universalism these days on the over-complexized west.
Based on ”actual” criteria to be masterly socially succesfull, social intelligence seems a measurement of how dominant you can be, based on conquest of power, political or economical. What i mean, shittsky.
emotion is intuitive
that means you are reading people from your subconscious.
women have better listening abilities than men and listening is intuitive.
women have higher bandwidth in the Corpus callosum.
and women are introverted –
they are in close connection with their body.
basically, females accept their emotion more on a subconscious level.
they go inward and listen to the inside, they trust their intuitions / feelings.
what feeling I get from you could be said to be feminine intuition.
the whole way I approach things.
you cannot formalize emotional intuitions any more than self-awareness during active music listening. I am sure eeg can source active listening but extreme formalization is an autistic trait.
”and women are introverted –”
You mean ”more introspective”*
Women tend to have soft personalities
Yes but they are not more introspective.
They are on avg but the most introspective are often males. Women are more concerned about another opinions which push them to think more about themselves. Empathy is related with introspection. But , introspection can be oriented to mundane or to more high intellectual stuff.
I thought cognitive empathy ”evolved” to competition while affective empathy to reinforce cooperation.
And, because males tend to be more dissociated from social life so ”they’ can push introspection to another stuff, high intellectual ones included.
Wow how did I guess that Baron-Cohen was an author of this paper.
“Because females (on average) lacked the spatial and logical IQ to hunt food and build shelter, they evolved the social IQ to find a man who could these things for them.”
Females like pink because they could find berries easier while gathering.
Click to access hurlberta_2007.pdf
hahaha. just-so stories.
Your storytelling aside, women don’t hunt because they don’t have the anatomy or physiology that males do, on average as I have documented here:
https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2019/02/27/that-high-school-running-competition-anatomic-and-physiologic-differences-between-men-and-women-and-the-possibility-of-sports-segregation-by-anatomy-and-physiology/
And there is no such thing as a “gendered brain.” Read Rippon.
And there is no such thing as a “gendered brain.” Read Rippon.
Semantics
How is it semantics? (post this not the other.)
Some people have chosen to use the word “male brain” to describe brain types that are more common in males than females. An arbitrary semantic decision.
Average differences between brains don’t support the “male/female brain” distinction.
Why not RaceRealist? Does average difference in genitalia not support “male/female genitalia” distinction?
RR is actually trans.
RR,
Interpretation problems. Someone must coach you!! =-=
I am happy to see I don’t do so bad at the eyes test 19.5 (would be 80 IQ) while I am very high in AQ test 46 (first try, more later) so that woulb be -4.5 or 25IQ.
I feel that with such a disadvantage, I am extraordinarily «lucky » to do very well in life. I had never feel depressed any day. My father was always amused by my enjoying so deeply
each tiny moment of life even when I was very young (like closing my eyes to enjoy a sweet or having long conversations with older people only). I don’t rock. And I haven’t walked in my tiptoes (but I push people aside when walking and i walk hugging the walls to the extreme ….)
Some men are able to read anyone expression. That must be so cool for politician. At the same time, for a CEO, I am not sure it is so good to know what people aournd you feel at any moment. Being driven by logic only is probable more effective in achieving big goals.
Politicians are often clueless about it, despising the gifted machiavellian ones among them, they just play the game and eat the cake, specially on disable democracy where is easier to ”clever’ avg joey to reach politic status and surfing for long time as a parasite, check it out bolzonario.
CEO or evolved-merchants seems better to read another intentions. They must understand psychology to be succesfull, to understand what people want and offer the products to $$$
And logic helps to predict a lot of what’s happening in real life. And even in fiction, I was able to predict 80% of what happened in last GoT episodes (in LoB site) so much that one guy wrote that I wrag HBO writers minds.
But now I understand that I am handicapped at direct comprehension of people facial emotions.
https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1XJKpEw5sy9o01D
I often score arounds 11/14 on this test
Weirdly I score 14/14 both times. They say it’s high above 10 !
I don’t understand how I can be a super recognizer while not being able to recognize characters in a movie when they change looks …. and being very bad at reading minds eyes ….
Maybe it’s different when you are concentrated in specific tasks and when you need to deal with a typical multitask as social interactions.
I think the best for a CEO is to be able to read people but not care so much about what they think.
I think this is the test they used if anyone wants to do it. https://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/
Btw, I think your Social IQ would be 80 if you set normal male Social IQ to 100. On a combined gender scale, it would be 73. But I’m not sure reading eyes is the be all, end all for social skills. Sounds like you have a pretty great life!
Being at 99.99% in the clinical autism self diagnostic test, i believe my 15th score at reading mind (same test author) is due to my IQ. It helps me go from -4.5 sd to just -1,3 sd.
That’s why IQ is always useful for everything. I regard this test scores as an illustration of Cooijmans theories of « autism » being like both losing a hand and a feet. First time I read that I thought it was an over-statement but I see it with those numbers.
While I was doing the eyes test, for most questions, I was just randomly guessing because I had no clue how the adjectives related to the face shown. That help me understand what s’ the bemusement or stupid people at IQ tests. You are just incredulous that some people can link the question and the answer and you don’t see how it would have in bearing on real life and mind .
But intelligence help you deduce/induce what you don’t feel on a first person (direct comprehension) level .
”Ibope: 73% of Brazilians oppose carrying arms
Women (80%) and residents of the Southeast Region (76%) are the groups that most reject authorization. An Ibope survey shows that loosening the rules of gun ownership in Brazil, the object of three decrees issued by President Jair Bolsonaro, are rejected by the majority of the population. According to the survey, anticipated by columnist Lauro Jardim, 61% of respondents are opposed to facilitating the criteria for owning firearms at home or at work. Already the authorization for ordinary citizens to carry arms with them in the streets is disapproved by 73%, according to Ibope. Rejection is greater among women.
According to the survey, only 37% of respondents said they were in favor of easing the possession of firearms. In January, Bolsonaro signed a decree in this direction, one of his campaign promises. The text removed from the Federal Police the decision on the necessity of the weapon: it suffices the declaration of the citizen. It is still necessary to have more than 25 years of age, to present attestations of technical aptitude, psychological report and to have no criminal record.
The Ibope survey showed that flexibility of the rules is only supported, in most, among those who earn more than five minimum wages (53%). In the South, the most favorable measure, there is a technical tie: 48% said yes, while 51% said they were against the new rules. (…)”
https://www.conversaafiada.com.br/brasil/ibope-73-detonam-projeto-de-armas-do-bolsonaro
Favor to flexibilization of gun ownership in Brazil
– rich
– white
– from south
– male
Are males truly more rational than females*
Pumpkin a bit off-topic but what’s your opinion on personality tests like Big Five, MBTI and DISC? From what I’ve read Big Five has more scientific support, but MBTI and DISC are still used by HR departments around the world.
I heard the interview of Scott Barry Kaufman with Robert Greene. The difference with Plumin is stunning. Probably RG is not more intelligent nor litterate than Plomin but the conversation is going such a different among those two, despite SBK having the same kind of prejudice against RG work.
RG was really more passive agressive against SBK, making fun of him without SBK noticing or even SBK asking to be reassured about RG appreciation of him. It was really amusing. The moment when RG tells him that he could only love a nerdy jewish guy is an hilarious moment of manipulation.
I had never heard about RG books before (shame on me !) but I was so impressed about his practical mastery with SBK, that I am going to buy on the spot !