Psychologists distinguish between cognitive empathy and emo…

Psychologists distinguish between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand another person's emotion, whereas emotional empathy is to feel that emotion along with them. Autists and narcissists both have trouble with empathy and may superficially appear to be similar to one another because of that. However, autists are usually said to be bad at cognitive empathy whereas narcissists lack emotional empathy. The autistic stereotype is someone who you have to spend some time explaining what he did that hurt your feelings but when he follows you, he will feel sorry about it. However, autists can become good at cognitive empathy if they can find a good theory to explain people. On the other hand, a narcissist develops his skills in cognitive empathy in order to manipulate people, and hence will always look at people in a simplified way, as if everyone is stupid and weak. Narcissists are likely to get the authentic and incorruptible aspects of a person completely wrong. Furthermore, narcissists also misread people because they themselves are so heavily self-deceptive and reliant on psychological defense mechanisms. This is the dynamic I see playing out in the history of economic thought. True economics is a kind of cognitive empathy, founded in theoretical rules which are broad enough to include the whole range of human sentiment. Necessarily, these rules are not very specific but they are also not limiting and thus can be applied to every real situation. False economics imagines people in a way that is simplified and inaccurate. This always results in a vision of people as fools who need management because for any simplified model you can always come up with scenarios in which people will not behave appropriately.