Could folks please stop giving advice on that unless there was a time when they had trouble with that, and know specifically what they did to overcome it?
I’m one of the people here who fit this description, but I may have been experiencing different-but-overlapping challenges to yours.
The primary social difficulties I used to have:
Severe social anxiety (probably undiagnosed social phobia)
Not knowing what to say and do in unscripted informal social situations
Difficulty reading people and developing models of how they respond and feel (theory of mind?)
I currently experience all these difficulties in lingering amounts, but probably no more than average people. And I am way ahead of others with similar personality traits and cognition to mine.
I engaged in a long period of social experimentation (handled “in software” to use Roko’s analogy). During this time, I developed the ability to understand many aspects of social interaction on an intuitive level, exercising social “muscles” I never knew I had (to switch to a completely different analogy).
As Blueberry describes, I had to risk making social blunders to learn. I made a bunch of people uncomfortable at various points in my learning process, such as when I was learning to be more spontaneous instead of turning over comments in my mind for minutes before uttering them, which sometimes involved me blurting out ill-considered things until I developed the right balance between filtering and spontaneity.
Yet I’ve never had difficulties comparable to getting in trouble with venue supervisors. I can’t even remember seriously offending anyone or having anyone unhappy with me.
For some reason, these were never lessons that I had to learn by trial-and-error, and the thread is making me think of some possibilities why:
I am non-confrontational, and have trouble expressing anger, aggression, or assertiveness (though I’ve improved on the last one)
People seem to perceive me as non-threatening and trustworthy
I was raised with a restrictive notion of manners
All of these factors contributed to me having social problems when I was younger, because I was unable to handle bullying and teasing, and I was perceived as a pushover and as rather mousy. Yet I wonder if these factors actually facilitated my efforts to learn social skills later in life.
Thanks to these factors, my own personality made it difficult for me to make significant social blunders and offend people in real life. Even when I was trying to act like a jerk, the result was still pretty nice relative to the average male. I was free to experiment, knowing that if things went wrong, the constraints of my own personality would keep me from causing real offense to people. Furthermore, with only a bit of social practice and observation, I became very sensitive to other people’s emotions. The social experimentation allowed me to learn social procedural knowledge very fast, such that I no longer had to view socializing as a form of experimentation at all (though that’s another discussion).
I also practiced facial expressions in the mirror a ton, and worked a lot on my voice tonality, to make sure that my subcommunication was really how I wanted to come across.
For someone with lower Agreeableness and lower interpersonal sensitivity trying to learn social skills, their experimentation might have a higher risk of going wrong in worse ways. If someone can learn social skills with only a small period of time of offending people, that might work, but any extended time in such a learning process is potentially grueling to the person involved (and of course difficult for those he or she is interacting with). If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, but if you find your shooting eggs out of rockets launchers, something may be wrong.
I would wonder if there are any ways to shorten that the process of learning social skills necessary to have interactions with people, while avoiding offending or alienating them, or getting in trouble with venue supervisors.
It’s been my experience that people with high Agreeableness are often under-served by social advice, and they end up getting walked over. Yet I’m starting to wonder if it’s also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways. Mainstream culture tells people to be polite and nice, but it doesn’t really explain how a low-Agreeableness person can connect with others betters. And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting “high status,” being “the prize,” and “not giving a crap.” These lessons may be useful to high-Agreeableness males with low-status, but badly backfire for low-Agreeabless males with low-status.
I can think more about how people with different personality traits to mine might learn social skills; it won’t be completely based on my own experience, but I do have some ideas.
Yet I’m starting to wonder if it’s also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways.
Low agreeableness makes it hard to even hear social advice properly. (It’s hard enough for males to accept advice even when agreeable.)
And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting “high status,” being “the prize,” and “not giving a crap.”
Surprisingly enough each of these three are still important for the low agreeableness/low status males to learn. It is just harder to explain which specific skills it would take to develop these attributes. Apologizing whenever someone else disapproves of you is not actually all that much different to attacking whenever someone else disapproves of you. It signals the same underlying insecurity.
I’m one of the people here who fit this description, but I may have been experiencing different-but-overlapping challenges to yours.
The primary social difficulties I used to have:
Severe social anxiety (probably undiagnosed social phobia)
Not knowing what to say and do in unscripted informal social situations
Difficulty reading people and developing models of how they respond and feel (theory of mind?)
I currently experience all these difficulties in lingering amounts, but probably no more than average people. And I am way ahead of others with similar personality traits and cognition to mine.
I engaged in a long period of social experimentation (handled “in software” to use Roko’s analogy). During this time, I developed the ability to understand many aspects of social interaction on an intuitive level, exercising social “muscles” I never knew I had (to switch to a completely different analogy).
As Blueberry describes, I had to risk making social blunders to learn. I made a bunch of people uncomfortable at various points in my learning process, such as when I was learning to be more spontaneous instead of turning over comments in my mind for minutes before uttering them, which sometimes involved me blurting out ill-considered things until I developed the right balance between filtering and spontaneity.
Yet I’ve never had difficulties comparable to getting in trouble with venue supervisors. I can’t even remember seriously offending anyone or having anyone unhappy with me.
For some reason, these were never lessons that I had to learn by trial-and-error, and the thread is making me think of some possibilities why:
I am very high in agreeableness and sensitivity
I am non-confrontational, and have trouble expressing anger, aggression, or assertiveness (though I’ve improved on the last one)
People seem to perceive me as non-threatening and trustworthy
I was raised with a restrictive notion of manners
All of these factors contributed to me having social problems when I was younger, because I was unable to handle bullying and teasing, and I was perceived as a pushover and as rather mousy. Yet I wonder if these factors actually facilitated my efforts to learn social skills later in life.
Thanks to these factors, my own personality made it difficult for me to make significant social blunders and offend people in real life. Even when I was trying to act like a jerk, the result was still pretty nice relative to the average male. I was free to experiment, knowing that if things went wrong, the constraints of my own personality would keep me from causing real offense to people. Furthermore, with only a bit of social practice and observation, I became very sensitive to other people’s emotions. The social experimentation allowed me to learn social procedural knowledge very fast, such that I no longer had to view socializing as a form of experimentation at all (though that’s another discussion).
I also practiced facial expressions in the mirror a ton, and worked a lot on my voice tonality, to make sure that my subcommunication was really how I wanted to come across.
For someone with lower Agreeableness and lower interpersonal sensitivity trying to learn social skills, their experimentation might have a higher risk of going wrong in worse ways. If someone can learn social skills with only a small period of time of offending people, that might work, but any extended time in such a learning process is potentially grueling to the person involved (and of course difficult for those he or she is interacting with). If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, but if you find your shooting eggs out of rockets launchers, something may be wrong.
I would wonder if there are any ways to shorten that the process of learning social skills necessary to have interactions with people, while avoiding offending or alienating them, or getting in trouble with venue supervisors.
It’s been my experience that people with high Agreeableness are often under-served by social advice, and they end up getting walked over. Yet I’m starting to wonder if it’s also the case that people with substantially low Agreeableness might also be under-served in different ways. Mainstream culture tells people to be polite and nice, but it doesn’t really explain how a low-Agreeableness person can connect with others betters. And alternative social advice (e.g. from PUAs) often is designed for high-Agreeableness males, and emphasizes acting “high status,” being “the prize,” and “not giving a crap.” These lessons may be useful to high-Agreeableness males with low-status, but badly backfire for low-Agreeabless males with low-status.
I can think more about how people with different personality traits to mine might learn social skills; it won’t be completely based on my own experience, but I do have some ideas.
Low agreeableness makes it hard to even hear social advice properly. (It’s hard enough for males to accept advice even when agreeable.)
Surprisingly enough each of these three are still important for the low agreeableness/low status males to learn. It is just harder to explain which specific skills it would take to develop these attributes. Apologizing whenever someone else disapproves of you is not actually all that much different to attacking whenever someone else disapproves of you. It signals the same underlying insecurity.