Thank you to Justis Millis for providing feedback and proofreading on this post. This post is also available on my Substack.

TL/DR: 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 asked people on Prolific a bunch of questions that are supposed to be related to autism, systemizing and empathy. As a preview before I get into the details, the overall results can be seen here:

If there was only a single underlying tradeoff that all of these scales were measuring, then we would expect all of the group differences to be highly correlated, with the items just varying [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) Background

(03:01) Data

(04:03) Principal component analysis

(06:43) Measurement invariance

(10:22) Improving interpretability

(15:58) Appendix: Item list

(23:19) Appendix: Score distributions

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 29 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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