I have trouble with this one. In general, what I’m doing with my body is largely determined by my efforts to maintain physical comfort and has little (albeit not quite zero) relationship with the interactions I’m having/emotions I’m experiencing.
My face also makes expressions without my permission that often have no obvious relationship with what I’m thinking or feeling, and I can’t tell without looking in a mirror. (I can make deliberate expressions, too, but this is effortful. Also some of them seem to be wrong: I have been told that my attempt at “attentive” is more “terrified”.)
My tone of voice is not quite as unruly, but sometimes misbehaves. And I’m not good at tracking when it’s doing that if I’m using my own words in real time and therefore have to compose them while I speak. On top of all this I have an undiagnosed breathing disorder that makes me yawn, sigh, and gasp a lot when the semantic content of these sounds is inappropriate.
Is there anything I can do to make people pay less attention to these cues, short of demanding that people only interact with me via text? I tell people these things but, except for the breathing thing, they often outright don’t believe me, and even the ones who claim to believe me seem to forget.
In general, what I’m doing with my body is largely determined by my efforts to maintain physical comfort and has little (albeit not quite zero) relationship with the interactions I’m having/emotions I’m experiencing.
Have you reached this conclusion by systematic study of your behavior, or is it just a vague impression that you have? If the latter, you may be extremely wrong about it. People usually have a horribly inaccurate view of what their behavior really looks like from the outside.
Besides, many crucial elements of body language are determined by movements that don’t affect physical comfort much.
I don’t know if I would call it “systematic”. However, people often make outright wrong assumptions about my attitudes and feelings and then explain that these inaccuracies were based on my body language. How many mistakes of this kind someone makes varies from person to person. At any rate, when I read lists of body language signals, anything on the list that I ever do, I at least sometimes do for comfort reasons.
My physical comfort is affected by a lot of things that other people don’t seem to be discomforted by.
At any rate, when I read lists of body language signals, anything on the list that I ever do, I at least sometimes do for comfort reasons.
Reading lists and then comparing them to what you think your behaviour is strikes me a a really bad way to get accurate results.
Video yourself. Just set the laptop down with the webcam taking in the room and record a video for yourself. Once you relax and stop worrying about the camera, observe the results. You will see things you had no idea about. Try to correct, videoing the result. Repeat.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, but I’m actually often intrusively aware of my position and what factors are going into it. I adjust it frequently, and this is almost always a conscious matter; the habits that I have which sometimes fall into the background (adjusting my glasses, straightening up so I can accommodate my weird breathing needs) are all comfort-based and just common enough that I can take care of them subconsciously.
Yeah, it’s a big YMMV. I used to interview people a lot and was frequently appalled to hear what my voice actually sounded like. Then people would tell me what a good phone voice I had. But I do think that in the general case, objectively recording what you’re actually doing will be much more informative than not.
I’ve found Skype conversations rather good for this—it has my video as well as the other person’s, and thus increases my awareness of a lot of my body language habits. It also means I’m engaged in a conversation, which seems to bring out significantly different body language.
People generally can’t not react to your body language, because nearly all of their reaction comes from their subconscious. The girl approached by the guy with poor body language does not think “If he walks like that then he must not have much confidence or success with women, and that must be because he doesn’t know how to show a woman a good time.” Rather, she just looks at him and thinks “Ewwww.”
So yeah, you gotta train your body language and your facial expressions. I am still in the process of training my facial expressions—which means that yes, I spend a lot of time in the mirror being surprised by the difference between what my face is doing and what I thought it was doing. (Built-in laptop webcams are great for this, too!)
These are skills that can be explicitly learned and practiced, just as with guitar-playing or salesmanship. And that’s good news.
The facial expressions could probably benefit from some combination of practice and coaching. The body language one is harder because, as I said: comfort. If I need to be sitting a certain way to not be cramped or trapping sweat or sliding out of my chair or whatever, that is going to take precedence over doing something somebody told me would indicate interest. Otherwise I will be uncomfortable and then my body language will eventually slide towards indicating (insofar as it indicates any true thing) “I am uncomfortable”, which isn’t right either.
Either he has communicated that he is awkward and uneasy around women and not fun to be around, or he has communicated that he is confident and successful with women and knows how to show them a good time.
Why do you believe this? Why do you believe that social skills equate to fun?
Children lack social skills (right?) and are known for their playfulness.
First off, you shouldn’t be asking about lukeprog’s opinion but about the opinion of the anonymous woman in his example, or about the distribution of that attitude more generally. Making friends and having fun with people is a statistical game, and the numbers are not on your side if you filter out all but a handful of social saints and atypical psychologies.
Second, improved social skills translate directly into avenues for social fun. If you’re looking for non-social fun, you don’t need more than rudimentary social skills, but it’s rare for people to be completely without a need for social interaction.
As to childhood, I don’t know about you, but my childhood would have been much more pleasant if I’d known to avoid avoidable rudeness and absorb unintended slights aimed at me. I’d also hazard a guess that younger children are wired in some way to have more social plasticity than adults (though note that that doesn’t mean tolerance); late childhood, where social roles become less fluid and more important but social skills are still poorly developed, can be pretty hellish especially for the nerdier folks among us.
has communicated that he is confident and successful with women and knows how to show them a good time.
to be an assertion on lukeprog’s part that “a good time” was dependent on competent social skills. I now see the intention was that the man was communicating confidence, success, and charm.
Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people. I still don’t understand why it takes a saint to allow others to be themselves. There are plenty of criteria to judge people on besides eye contact, voice modulation, posture, and the ability to feign interest. Your mind is only going to register minor transgressions for a few fleeting seconds.
Those who are attempting to deceive should be mistrusted, that seems more axiomatic than guesses as to statistical distributions of personality types. The fear is that social skills include the dark arts. When successful people utilize social skills well enough to fool some but not others, some observers who are not convinced feel revulsion. When a peer is revealed to be feigning interest for personal gain, what should be the consequence? When it is revealed that a statistically significant portion of the population is dishonest, why should a person seek out peers? Only because it is necessary, no matter how distasteful, to bite one’s tongue and smile.
Please realize, I do understand that social skills are important and a tool to success. I practice, I sometimes act poorly, and I try again. While eminently practical, social skills are still arbitrary social convention and an inconvenience for those who are least interested.
“Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people”
No. As someone with Asperger’s, I can say ‘we’ really, really haven’t. There really are only three options—learn to control your body language, tone of voice etc so that you are playing by the rules most people in your society are playing by, accept that most people will dislike you if you’re slightly different and concentrate on being friends with only other ‘different’ people, or be desperately unhappy.
I remember there being a communication rule of thumb: ‘accept sloppy input, but transmit strict output’. It would be nice if all people were more permissive, but in any case having to conform to the output protocol/social norms is desirable.
...I know that in a lot of cases the rules seem unnecessarily complex when you can get people to articulate them at all, and having to learn this isn’t easy. I wish there was an easy way to fix this. I was rather socially awkward as a child, and really only started learning how to handle myself socially after I reached majority. It involved a lot of trial and error, and frustration.
How much of your communication do you want to be about navigating social protocols? How confident are you that you are not stuck in a locally optimized set of social interactions?
Upon reflection, I would say that is an ability to switch fluidly amongst a variety of different interaction protocols, matching your behavior to your audience. It is not immediately clear that an adaptive strategy is worth the computational costs.
Unfortunately, the number of interaction patterns is vast. If one has a novel idea, in order to be effective individually one must be fluent in direct social interaction, online and print display, e-mail and online discussion, narrative and technical writing, and preferably additional talents of personal interest. This is in addition to being fluent in the subject you are expounding. Further complicate this continuously updating probabilities that you are wasting your time on your audience.
The temptation to avoid social interaction often outweighs the perceived benefit. The price of interaction is often very high in terms of lost productivity for failed attempts.
You don’t have to achieve the most optimal fluency. I think that learning basic social interaction is much like learning typing, in that it reduces the amount of time you will spend performing tasks and correcting mistakes related to it by many times the time spent learning over your lifetime. Becoming locally-optimized may very well be good enough for most people.
Avoidance works well some of the time, but when it fails it’s nice to have at least a small amount of ability to fall back on.
Concerning facial expressions? I’m training myself to express with my face what I intend to express with my face. What I intend to express will depend on the effect I’m trying to create in the social situation.
I’m not entirely sure of how your question relates to this discussion, but to answer it in the general case… Assuming the elephant is well-trained, then it’s usually better for it to be in control. For instance, you’ll want to let your elephant handle moving your feet back and forth when walking, instead of needing to consciously think about each step. You want to let your elephant automatically interpret others’ facial expressions, instead of having to figure out their meaning yourself, and so forth. Of course, if the elephant is badly trained and e.g. misreads others’ expressions, then you should re-train it. But once you’ve done so, you’ll want it to take over again.
The rider is conscious, directed attention which tires quickly. The elephant is automatic processes which run constantly and tire much more slowly. You should train your elephant to take care of as many things as possible, and conserve the rider’s energy to only the cases where it’s really needed.
Of course, the “should” is kinda redundant here, since you can’t avoid doing this. Whenever you repeat some behavior long enough for it to become automatic, you’re training the elephant to act in a certain way and then transferring control to it.
Deadpan is doable, and easier than deliberate expressions, but unless I’m making specific types of jokes, it’s at odds with the cheery cute persona I prefer to project.
I’m atypical of people on this board, as some of you might know. I found it through my son, who fits the demographics much more. I’m a clinical social worker/ child therapist- thus my name “play therapist”. What I didn’t see mentioned, which I think is probably a more common problem than people not using the right body language to convey what they mean to, is not picking up on the body language, tone of facial expressions and tone of voice of people you are speaking to. I don’t have any easy answers about how to learn to read them, it’s something that is intuitive for most people. If you can learn to read people that way, though, it will be a huge help in social interactions. For example, when you say something and there is no response, there will usually be non-verbal cues as to whether you were heard.
Perhaps watching people taking acting lessons might help? Those people are trying to learn body language, vocalization, and effective communication, so seeing what they do when they get it right may help with learning how to read others.
I think watching people taking acting lessons must be a very good way to learn how to read others. Unfortunately, it’s not something that’s very convenient for most people to do. I think focusing in on the facial expressions and body language of good actresses and actors while watching movies, t.v., etc. would help, too.
Unfortunately I think it will be extremely difficult to make people pay less attention to these cues, especially because there is a large body of research indicating that they are quite meaningful indeed—see Ekman for more information.
Now, it’s possible that in your case they are not, or convey meanings that you are not attempting to convey, but this would be quite unusual and I think many would have trouble with it.
I have trouble with this one. In general, what I’m doing with my body is largely determined by my efforts to maintain physical comfort and has little (albeit not quite zero) relationship with the interactions I’m having/emotions I’m experiencing.
My face also makes expressions without my permission that often have no obvious relationship with what I’m thinking or feeling, and I can’t tell without looking in a mirror. (I can make deliberate expressions, too, but this is effortful. Also some of them seem to be wrong: I have been told that my attempt at “attentive” is more “terrified”.)
My tone of voice is not quite as unruly, but sometimes misbehaves. And I’m not good at tracking when it’s doing that if I’m using my own words in real time and therefore have to compose them while I speak. On top of all this I have an undiagnosed breathing disorder that makes me yawn, sigh, and gasp a lot when the semantic content of these sounds is inappropriate.
Is there anything I can do to make people pay less attention to these cues, short of demanding that people only interact with me via text? I tell people these things but, except for the breathing thing, they often outright don’t believe me, and even the ones who claim to believe me seem to forget.
Have you reached this conclusion by systematic study of your behavior, or is it just a vague impression that you have? If the latter, you may be extremely wrong about it. People usually have a horribly inaccurate view of what their behavior really looks like from the outside.
Besides, many crucial elements of body language are determined by movements that don’t affect physical comfort much.
I don’t know if I would call it “systematic”. However, people often make outright wrong assumptions about my attitudes and feelings and then explain that these inaccuracies were based on my body language. How many mistakes of this kind someone makes varies from person to person. At any rate, when I read lists of body language signals, anything on the list that I ever do, I at least sometimes do for comfort reasons.
My physical comfort is affected by a lot of things that other people don’t seem to be discomforted by.
Reading lists and then comparing them to what you think your behaviour is strikes me a a really bad way to get accurate results.
Video yourself. Just set the laptop down with the webcam taking in the room and record a video for yourself. Once you relax and stop worrying about the camera, observe the results. You will see things you had no idea about. Try to correct, videoing the result. Repeat.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, but I’m actually often intrusively aware of my position and what factors are going into it. I adjust it frequently, and this is almost always a conscious matter; the habits that I have which sometimes fall into the background (adjusting my glasses, straightening up so I can accommodate my weird breathing needs) are all comfort-based and just common enough that I can take care of them subconsciously.
Yeah, it’s a big YMMV. I used to interview people a lot and was frequently appalled to hear what my voice actually sounded like. Then people would tell me what a good phone voice I had. But I do think that in the general case, objectively recording what you’re actually doing will be much more informative than not.
I’ve found Skype conversations rather good for this—it has my video as well as the other person’s, and thus increases my awareness of a lot of my body language habits. It also means I’m engaged in a conversation, which seems to bring out significantly different body language.
Interesting. I’d never thought to deliberately seek out a list of body language signals before. :)
People generally can’t not react to your body language, because nearly all of their reaction comes from their subconscious. The girl approached by the guy with poor body language does not think “If he walks like that then he must not have much confidence or success with women, and that must be because he doesn’t know how to show a woman a good time.” Rather, she just looks at him and thinks “Ewwww.”
So yeah, you gotta train your body language and your facial expressions. I am still in the process of training my facial expressions—which means that yes, I spend a lot of time in the mirror being surprised by the difference between what my face is doing and what I thought it was doing. (Built-in laptop webcams are great for this, too!)
These are skills that can be explicitly learned and practiced, just as with guitar-playing or salesmanship. And that’s good news.
The facial expressions could probably benefit from some combination of practice and coaching. The body language one is harder because, as I said: comfort. If I need to be sitting a certain way to not be cramped or trapping sweat or sliding out of my chair or whatever, that is going to take precedence over doing something somebody told me would indicate interest. Otherwise I will be uncomfortable and then my body language will eventually slide towards indicating (insofar as it indicates any true thing) “I am uncomfortable”, which isn’t right either.
Why do you believe this? Why do you believe that social skills equate to fun?
Children lack social skills (right?) and are known for their playfulness.
First off, you shouldn’t be asking about lukeprog’s opinion but about the opinion of the anonymous woman in his example, or about the distribution of that attitude more generally. Making friends and having fun with people is a statistical game, and the numbers are not on your side if you filter out all but a handful of social saints and atypical psychologies.
Second, improved social skills translate directly into avenues for social fun. If you’re looking for non-social fun, you don’t need more than rudimentary social skills, but it’s rare for people to be completely without a need for social interaction.
As to childhood, I don’t know about you, but my childhood would have been much more pleasant if I’d known to avoid avoidable rudeness and absorb unintended slights aimed at me. I’d also hazard a guess that younger children are wired in some way to have more social plasticity than adults (though note that that doesn’t mean tolerance); late childhood, where social roles become less fluid and more important but social skills are still poorly developed, can be pretty hellish especially for the nerdier folks among us.
Oh, I mistook
to be an assertion on lukeprog’s part that “a good time” was dependent on competent social skills. I now see the intention was that the man was communicating confidence, success, and charm.
Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people. I still don’t understand why it takes a saint to allow others to be themselves. There are plenty of criteria to judge people on besides eye contact, voice modulation, posture, and the ability to feign interest. Your mind is only going to register minor transgressions for a few fleeting seconds.
Those who are attempting to deceive should be mistrusted, that seems more axiomatic than guesses as to statistical distributions of personality types. The fear is that social skills include the dark arts. When successful people utilize social skills well enough to fool some but not others, some observers who are not convinced feel revulsion. When a peer is revealed to be feigning interest for personal gain, what should be the consequence? When it is revealed that a statistically significant portion of the population is dishonest, why should a person seek out peers? Only because it is necessary, no matter how distasteful, to bite one’s tongue and smile.
Please realize, I do understand that social skills are important and a tool to success. I practice, I sometimes act poorly, and I try again. While eminently practical, social skills are still arbitrary social convention and an inconvenience for those who are least interested.
“Still, haven’t we all been raised to be accepting of other people”
No. As someone with Asperger’s, I can say ‘we’ really, really haven’t. There really are only three options—learn to control your body language, tone of voice etc so that you are playing by the rules most people in your society are playing by, accept that most people will dislike you if you’re slightly different and concentrate on being friends with only other ‘different’ people, or be desperately unhappy.
I remember there being a communication rule of thumb: ‘accept sloppy input, but transmit strict output’. It would be nice if all people were more permissive, but in any case having to conform to the output protocol/social norms is desirable.
...I know that in a lot of cases the rules seem unnecessarily complex when you can get people to articulate them at all, and having to learn this isn’t easy. I wish there was an easy way to fix this. I was rather socially awkward as a child, and really only started learning how to handle myself socially after I reached majority. It involved a lot of trial and error, and frustration.
Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.”
How much of your communication do you want to be about navigating social protocols? How confident are you that you are not stuck in a locally optimized set of social interactions?
Upon reflection, I would say that is an ability to switch fluidly amongst a variety of different interaction protocols, matching your behavior to your audience. It is not immediately clear that an adaptive strategy is worth the computational costs.
Unfortunately, the number of interaction patterns is vast. If one has a novel idea, in order to be effective individually one must be fluent in direct social interaction, online and print display, e-mail and online discussion, narrative and technical writing, and preferably additional talents of personal interest. This is in addition to being fluent in the subject you are expounding. Further complicate this continuously updating probabilities that you are wasting your time on your audience.
The temptation to avoid social interaction often outweighs the perceived benefit. The price of interaction is often very high in terms of lost productivity for failed attempts.
You don’t have to achieve the most optimal fluency. I think that learning basic social interaction is much like learning typing, in that it reduces the amount of time you will spend performing tasks and correcting mistakes related to it by many times the time spent learning over your lifetime. Becoming locally-optimized may very well be good enough for most people.
Avoidance works well some of the time, but when it fails it’s nice to have at least a small amount of ability to fall back on.
It’s not always correct, it’s just the heuristic that brains use.
.
Concerning facial expressions? I’m training myself to express with my face what I intend to express with my face. What I intend to express will depend on the effect I’m trying to create in the social situation.
.
I’m not entirely sure of how your question relates to this discussion, but to answer it in the general case… Assuming the elephant is well-trained, then it’s usually better for it to be in control. For instance, you’ll want to let your elephant handle moving your feet back and forth when walking, instead of needing to consciously think about each step. You want to let your elephant automatically interpret others’ facial expressions, instead of having to figure out their meaning yourself, and so forth. Of course, if the elephant is badly trained and e.g. misreads others’ expressions, then you should re-train it. But once you’ve done so, you’ll want it to take over again.
The rider is conscious, directed attention which tires quickly. The elephant is automatic processes which run constantly and tire much more slowly. You should train your elephant to take care of as many things as possible, and conserve the rider’s energy to only the cases where it’s really needed.
Of course, the “should” is kinda redundant here, since you can’t avoid doing this. Whenever you repeat some behavior long enough for it to become automatic, you’re training the elephant to act in a certain way and then transferring control to it.
.
Would it be better to try to make yourself really deadpan / inscrutable?
Deadpan is doable, and easier than deliberate expressions, but unless I’m making specific types of jokes, it’s at odds with the cheery cute persona I prefer to project.
You can try to practice in front of a mirror. I don’t know how much that will help, but it may.
Voice control is hard for some people. Singing with pop music, and just using your voice more in general perhaps will help.
In either case, you’re running into some serious difficulties. I wish I could offer better advice or help.
I’m atypical of people on this board, as some of you might know. I found it through my son, who fits the demographics much more. I’m a clinical social worker/ child therapist- thus my name “play therapist”. What I didn’t see mentioned, which I think is probably a more common problem than people not using the right body language to convey what they mean to, is not picking up on the body language, tone of facial expressions and tone of voice of people you are speaking to. I don’t have any easy answers about how to learn to read them, it’s something that is intuitive for most people. If you can learn to read people that way, though, it will be a huge help in social interactions. For example, when you say something and there is no response, there will usually be non-verbal cues as to whether you were heard.
Perhaps watching people taking acting lessons might help? Those people are trying to learn body language, vocalization, and effective communication, so seeing what they do when they get it right may help with learning how to read others.
I think watching people taking acting lessons must be a very good way to learn how to read others. Unfortunately, it’s not something that’s very convenient for most people to do. I think focusing in on the facial expressions and body language of good actresses and actors while watching movies, t.v., etc. would help, too.
Unfortunately I think it will be extremely difficult to make people pay less attention to these cues, especially because there is a large body of research indicating that they are quite meaningful indeed—see Ekman for more information.
Now, it’s possible that in your case they are not, or convey meanings that you are not attempting to convey, but this would be quite unusual and I think many would have trouble with it.