Intuitive and Deliberative Empathizers and Systemizers

Recent findings suggest there may be some overlap between individual differences in orientations for intuitive thinking and empathizing, and between deliberative thinking and systemizing. This overlap is surprising, given that intuitive and deliberative thinking derive from dual-process theories that concern domain-general types of processing, whereas theoretically, empathizing and systemizing are domain-specific orientations for understanding people and lawful physical phenomena.

The present studies (Study 1: N = 2,789, Study 2: N = 87; Finnish volunteers ages 15-69, 65% females) analyzed each of these four constructs using self-report as well as performance measures.

Confirmatory factor analysis showed that systemizing was strongly and positively related to deliberative thinking and negatively related to intuitive thinking. Empathizing was negatively related to deliberative thinking, whereas no association between empathizing and intuition was found. However, some deliberative aspects and some intuitive aspects were involved in empathizing.

The findings indicate that a distinction between "intuitive empathizing" and "deliberative systemizing" is not warranted.