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.
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.
.