Empathiser or Systemiser? Understanding the Two Key Thinking Styles

What are the differences between the empathiser and systemiser brain’s thinking styles, and how these two types process the world?

Empathiser vs Systemiser Explained

They refer to the two core dimensions in Simon Baron-Cohen’s Empathising–Systemising (E–S) theory, a framework for understanding individual differences in thinking style. It was developed primarily to explain typical sex differences in thinking styles and the profile seen in autism spectrum conditions.

What Is Empathising?

Empathising is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. It has two main aspects:

Cognitive empathy (also called theory of mind) figuring out what someone is thinking or feeling. 

Affective empathy, having an emotional response that matches or appropriately addresses the other person’s state.

Typical strengths of strong empathisers (Type E):  Quickly picking up on subtle social cues, tone of voice, body language, and unspoken tension. 

Ease in social situations, comforting others, and navigating relationships. 

Preference for people-oriented activities and careers (e.g., counseling, teaching, nursing, HR, or any role involving emotional attunement). 

Strong intuition about how others are feeling, often before anything is said.

What Is Systemising?

Systemising is the drive to analyze, understand, predict, and construct rule-based systems. A “system” is anything that follows input process, output rules, mechanical (engines, computers), abstract (mathematics, music theory, legal codes), natural (weather patterns, biology), or even social rituals that can be reduced to predictable patterns.

Typical strengths of strong systemisers (Type S):  Fascination with how things work, pattern recognition, and extracting underlying rules. 

Skill at analyzing or building systems (e.g., coding, engineering, music composition, data analysis, mechanical repair). 

Preference for structured, logical, or detail-oriented tasks. 

Comfort with solitary or focused work that involves rules, categories, or cause-and-effect relationships.

Population Balance between Empathizers & Systemisers

There is believed to be roughly an equal balance between empathisers and systemisers. However, most will hover around the middle of the scale, with a minority of people falling into the extremes of these two thinking types.   

Autism & Systemising

Autistic people (on average, across sexes) score higher on the systemising scale and related performance tests of systemising than non-autistic people. They also tend to show lower empathizing (especially cognitive empathy, including reading others’ mental states).

Large-scale studies (including one with 500,000 people, of whom 36,000 were autistic) find that autistic individuals are more likely to have a “Type S” or “Extreme Type S” cognitive profile (systemising stronger than empathising). This holds for both autistic men and women and is described as a more “masculinised” profile on the E-S dimensions.

The related hypersystemising theory proposes that the systemising mechanism is unusually high in autism. This helps explain nonsocial features such as intense restricted interests, attention to detail, preference for sameness/routines, and (in some cases) savant skills in rule-based domains like math, music, calendrical calculation, or pattern recognition.

Autistic people are overrepresented in STEM fields when they pursue higher education, and genetic studies have found partial overlap between variants linked to autism and those linked to high systemising.