In my case, I find Romeo’s approximation to be a fairly good descriptor of how I operate. There’s obviously a whole bunch of conditionals, of course, and if I were to try and reduce it down, it might look like:
In general:
1) Talking to someone? Figure out what they’re interested in, and how you can offer resources to help them advance their goals.
2) If there’s tangential overlap, maybe mention your own goals.
3) Iterate back and forth for a while with questions.
If you’re generally interested in learning more about the other person, they tend to reciprocate in nice ways, e.g. giving attention to your own stuff. [I think this is enough of an approximation to “just be naively good”?]
Then there’s a few corollaries:
a) With a casual friend? Intersperse conversation with banter.
b) Talking to someone new? Use generally accepted stereotype phrases (comment on weather, etc.) and then introduce yourself. Maybe start by complimenting something of theirs.
But all of this is fairly black-boxed, and I tend not to operate by explicitly reasoning these things out, i.e. the above rules are a result of my applying introspection / reductionism to what are usually “hidden” rules.
The closest I get to any of the (weird-from-my-perspective) recursive modeling / explicit reasoning is when I have no idea what to say. In such a case, I might ask myself, “What would [insert socially adept friend] do?” which queries my inner simulator of them and often spits out passable suggestions.
That seems like a possible selection effect.
In my case, I find Romeo’s approximation to be a fairly good descriptor of how I operate. There’s obviously a whole bunch of conditionals, of course, and if I were to try and reduce it down, it might look like:
In general: 1) Talking to someone? Figure out what they’re interested in, and how you can offer resources to help them advance their goals. 2) If there’s tangential overlap, maybe mention your own goals. 3) Iterate back and forth for a while with questions.
If you’re generally interested in learning more about the other person, they tend to reciprocate in nice ways, e.g. giving attention to your own stuff. [I think this is enough of an approximation to “just be naively good”?]
Then there’s a few corollaries: a) With a casual friend? Intersperse conversation with banter. b) Talking to someone new? Use generally accepted stereotype phrases (comment on weather, etc.) and then introduce yourself. Maybe start by complimenting something of theirs.
But all of this is fairly black-boxed, and I tend not to operate by explicitly reasoning these things out, i.e. the above rules are a result of my applying introspection / reductionism to what are usually “hidden” rules.
The closest I get to any of the (weird-from-my-perspective) recursive modeling / explicit reasoning is when I have no idea what to say. In such a case, I might ask myself, “What would [insert socially adept friend] do?” which queries my inner simulator of them and often spits out passable suggestions.