Christopher Badcock

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Christopher R. Badcock (1946–) is a British sociologist who promotes pseudoscience about autism and makes other bad-faith arguments. Badcock is an Emeritus Reader in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Autism and schizophrenia pseudoscience

“”In other words, while autistics don't mentalize enough, psychotics mentalize too much; where autistics don't seem to have minds at all, psychotics suffer from cancers of the minds they do have.

—Christopher Robert Badcock, who doesn't seem to realize that he's talking about actual human beings

In 2016, Christopher Badcock published two Psychology Today articles claiming that autistic people were "undomesticated humans" (using "evidence" like head size and ear shape and the debunked claim that autistics are violent) and people with schizophrenia were "hyper-domesticated humans."

Badcock has also published articles with other "fun" claims, like:

• Autistics lacking theory of mind (debunked)
• Wealth causing the "autism epidemic" (which probably isn't a real thing)
• Males being naturally more autistic and females naturally being more psychotic, and Western society being more autistic and thus having more "LGBT-ism"
• Failing to examine gendered biases in diagnosis, like thinking that "the overwhelmingly female incidence of hysteria in the 19^th century" was a sign that women were mentally ill more often (instead of being more likely to be diagnosed by men after they dared to protest against sexism).

In 2020, these articles surfaced on Twitter, where autistics expressed their disappointment. "Apparently we autistics are nothing more than undomesticated humans with aggressive behavior, facial anomalies and… weird ears," wrote autistic parent and artist Steve Asbell. Another autistic person said "Just curious, does the author think we’re irritable and agressive^[sic] before or after showing us this article?"

Homophobic misinformation

See the main article on this topic: Debunked: gay men have 500-1000 partners

In 2017, Dr. Badcock penned another atrocious article about promiscuity for Psychology Today, in which he claimed: "one study in San Francisco found that nearly 50% of gay men had more than 500 partners" without a citation. In reality, statistics he cites appear to have come from a 1978 survey of sex club attendees and prostitutes (Bell & Weinberg), which didn't rely on anything close to a representative sample. Despite the already ridiculous claim, Badcock actually inflated the original statistic to 50% from 43% which was published in the survey. The statistic is commonly recited by extremist anti-gay organizations, making you wonder what kind of material Badcock immerses himself in. Did he intentionally use it for dramatic effect or did he use it because he holds some bias against gay men and wants to perpetuate stereotypes? It wouldn't have been hard for Badcock to rely on any of the numerous long-term and robust representative sample studies, which show that gay men typically have between 10 and 20 sexual partners in their life (median). One has to wonder why Badcock was ever made an Emeritus Reader at a credible university in the first place. Perhaps Badcock was talking about himself when he said "autistics don't seem to have minds at all".

Links to the far-right

Badcock was interviewed on white nationalist Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic podcast.

See also

• Autism
• Schizophrenia
• Debunked: gay men have 500-1000 partners