Instructional Designer

Systemizing vs Empathizing


I recently ran across an article from Jed Diamond @ MenAlive.com, published Apr 10, 2021, entitled “The Truth About Men: Our Weakness is the Key To Our Greatness” that spoke about two types of brains: the Systemizing brain, and the Empathizing brain.

Image taken from Kenneth Roberson article “The Empathizing-Systemizing Theory Of Adult Asperger’s”

The systemizing brain seems to be more tuned to work out how things are made, how they work, how they function, etc. The empathizing brain seems to be more tuned to how things feel and how they are felt.

I was intrigued by this article, and wanted to use it to create a personality type test and test the functionality of H5P.

This “personality type test” is not actually correct in it’s design. The true test, which can be found both in the article mentioned and in the book is scored differently, but due to the constraints of the software (H5P) that I used to implement this test, I modified it slightly. Therefore, the results of MY version of the test shown below are for entertainment purposes only, and if you want to know the real results, then please go see Dr. Baron-Cohen’s book or read the article.

In the real test, each question is scored points, and you actually take 2 tests. One for systemizing and one for empathizing. You add up all the points for each, subtract the empathizing score from the systemizing score and then check your answer against a chart. According to Dr. Baron-Cohen, Extreme Empathizers are rare (3% of women, 1% of men), Empathizers (40% women, 24% men), Balanced (31% males, 30% women), Systemizers (40% male, 26% female) and Extreme systemizers, again rare (4% males, 2% females). Where do you fall?