Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen (born 15 August 1958) is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. Baron-Cohen has worked in autism research for over 40 years, starting in 1982. In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mindblindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995. In 1997, he formulated the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015. In 2003, Baron-Cohen formulated the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory of autism and typical sex differences, the key test of which was published in 2018. Baron-Cohen has also made major contributions to both basic and applied research in autism, and to the field of synaesthesia. He was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to people with autism. In 2023, Baron-Cohen was awarded the Medical Research Council (MRC) Millennium Medal. He is the 2026 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology.
Early life and education Baron-Cohen was born into a Jewish family in London, the second son of Judith and Hyman Vivian Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen has an elder brother, Dan Baron Cohen, and three younger siblings: brother Ash Baron-Cohen and sisters Suzie and Liz. His cousins include actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and composer Erran Baron Cohen. His maternal uncle was Canadian racing driver and constructor David Greenblatt. His maternal great-uncle was endocrinologist Robert Benjamin Greenblatt. Baron-Cohen completed a BA in human sciences at New College, Oxford, and an MPhil in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. He received a PhD in psychology at University College London; Baron-Cohen's doctoral research was in collaboration with his supervisor, Uta Frith.
Career Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS), the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Society of Medicine, the International Society for Autism Research and the Association for Psychological Science. He is a BPS Chartered Psychologist and a Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Baron-Cohen serves as vice-president of the National Autistic Society (UK), and was the 2012 chair of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guideline Development Group for adults with autism. He has served as vice-president and president of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR). Baron-Cohen was the founding co-editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Autism. He was the chair of the Psychology Section of the British Academy. As a clinical psychologist he created the first clinic in the UK for late adult autism diagnosis. Baron-Cohen gave the keynote lecture on the topic of "Autism and Human Rights" at the United Nations on World Autism Awareness Day in 2017. In August 2026 he asked for his name to be removed from an open letter from the Good Law Project, which had been published in support of Professor Jason Arday. Following Arday's death, speaking to the BBC, Baron-Cohen said he had spoken to Arday on the morning of his death, saying, "He has experienced what he described as a campaign against him, for the last three years... The personal attacks on him have been so immense."
Research
The mindblindness theory of autism In 1985, while he was member of the MRC Cognitive Development Unit (CDU) in London, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues Uta Frith and Alan Leslie formulated the "theory of mind" (ToM) hypothesis, to explain the social-communication difficulties in autism. ToM (also known as "cognitive empathy") is the brain's partially innate mechanism for rapidly making sense of social behavior by effortlessly attributing mental states to others, enabling behavioral prediction and social communication skills. They confirmed this using the false belief test, showing that a typical four-year-old child can infer another person's belief that is different to their own, while autistic children on average are delayed in this ability. Baron-Cohen's 1995 book, Mindblindness summarized his subsequent experiments in ToM and the disability in ToM in autism. Using the "reading the mind in the eyes test" (or "Eyes Test") he designed, Baron-Cohen interpreted evidence that may suggest that autistic children are blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes and show difficulties in advanced ToM. A 2024 systematic scoping review, however, has questioned the validity of Eyes Test scores as a measure of ToM, despite the test's widespread use. He conducted the first neuroimaging study of ToM in typical and autistic adults, and studied patients with acquired brain damage, demonstrating lesions in the orbito- and medial-prefrontal cortex and amygdala can impair ToM. Baron-Cohen also reported the first evidence of atypical amygdala function in autism during ToM. In 2017, his team studied 80,000 genotyped individuals who took the eyes test. Baron-Cohen found single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) partly contribute to individual differences on this dimensional trait measure on which autistic people show difficulties. This was the evidence that cognitive empathy/ToM is partly heritable. The National Institutes of Health recommended Baron-Cohen's eyes test as a core measure that should be used as part of the Research Domain Criteria (RDOC) for assessing social cognition.
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