Everyone tells me that, but in my experience the reverse is true.
Intuitively, your claim makes sense. There’s so much nuance in human communication that it would be impossible to learn even a fraction of it from a book. For example, let’s say you have a slightly politically incorrect joke you want to tell. How do you know if it’s an appropriate time to say it? There are so many variables that have to be plugged into this function—number of people around you, closeness of the people to you, closeness of the people to each other, your own delivery, each person’s unique personality, age of the people relative to you, social status of you versus your audience, formality of the occasion, location, even time of day. So if you were trying to answer the question “when can I tell a politically incorrect joke?” you wouldn’t be able to read a book and figure it out—you would have to go and hang out with people and watch them tell politically incorrect jokes until you got an intuitive understanding of when it is permissible.
But the thing is, most socially awkward people report having occasional “on nights” where they are utterly charismatic, confident, say all the right things, and don’t run out of things to talk about. This implies that the intuitive knowledge of what to say that is necessary for good social skills actually already exists somewhere in the socially awkward person’s brain—it’s just not being accessed at the right time. So for the majority of people, learning social skills is more about making the right conditions to gain access to the buried intuitive knowledge of how to talk to people than it is actually learning how to talk to people. (Of course, you can’t take this to an extreme and imagine that a stereotypical foreveralone WoW-player type can shut himself in a room with a bunch of books and come out a Casanova.)
I don’t think the above two paragraphs convey my thoughts on this subject anywhere near perfectly, but that’s sort of where I’m coming from. My experience is that in the course of reading things on this subject, I’ll wade through lots of boring, obvious stuff, until every so often I read something that gives me a huge a-ha moment, upon which I instantly recognize that a certain thought habit I have is maladaptive and weird and damaging my relationships and immediately permanently reverse it.
This is also how I see it. Most of the power is already in your brain, although of course you get better by practice. But for many people the power is somehow “locked”. Something you find in the book, or doing some exercise you find in the book, may help unlock the power.
Evo-psych hypothesis: Everyone has the power, but there is a mechanism detecting that “your status is too low to do this”, which turns off the power, to avoid punishment by higher-status members of the tribe who want to preserve the social hierarchy. But the mechanism is an adaptation to the ancient environment, and is often miscalibrated today. Something in the book may help turn off the low-status feeling. (Perhaps even the fact that someone with high status, such as the author of the book, encourages you to behave high-status, can be perceived by the mechanism as an evidence of your status rising. It could be an equivalent of getting a powerful friend.)
Everyone tells me that, but in my experience the reverse is true.
Intuitively, your claim makes sense. There’s so much nuance in human communication that it would be impossible to learn even a fraction of it from a book. For example, let’s say you have a slightly politically incorrect joke you want to tell. How do you know if it’s an appropriate time to say it? There are so many variables that have to be plugged into this function—number of people around you, closeness of the people to you, closeness of the people to each other, your own delivery, each person’s unique personality, age of the people relative to you, social status of you versus your audience, formality of the occasion, location, even time of day. So if you were trying to answer the question “when can I tell a politically incorrect joke?” you wouldn’t be able to read a book and figure it out—you would have to go and hang out with people and watch them tell politically incorrect jokes until you got an intuitive understanding of when it is permissible.
But the thing is, most socially awkward people report having occasional “on nights” where they are utterly charismatic, confident, say all the right things, and don’t run out of things to talk about. This implies that the intuitive knowledge of what to say that is necessary for good social skills actually already exists somewhere in the socially awkward person’s brain—it’s just not being accessed at the right time. So for the majority of people, learning social skills is more about making the right conditions to gain access to the buried intuitive knowledge of how to talk to people than it is actually learning how to talk to people. (Of course, you can’t take this to an extreme and imagine that a stereotypical foreveralone WoW-player type can shut himself in a room with a bunch of books and come out a Casanova.)
I don’t think the above two paragraphs convey my thoughts on this subject anywhere near perfectly, but that’s sort of where I’m coming from. My experience is that in the course of reading things on this subject, I’ll wade through lots of boring, obvious stuff, until every so often I read something that gives me a huge a-ha moment, upon which I instantly recognize that a certain thought habit I have is maladaptive and weird and damaging my relationships and immediately permanently reverse it.
This is also how I see it. Most of the power is already in your brain, although of course you get better by practice. But for many people the power is somehow “locked”. Something you find in the book, or doing some exercise you find in the book, may help unlock the power.
Evo-psych hypothesis: Everyone has the power, but there is a mechanism detecting that “your status is too low to do this”, which turns off the power, to avoid punishment by higher-status members of the tribe who want to preserve the social hierarchy. But the mechanism is an adaptation to the ancient environment, and is often miscalibrated today. Something in the book may help turn off the low-status feeling. (Perhaps even the fact that someone with high status, such as the author of the book, encourages you to behave high-status, can be perceived by the mechanism as an evidence of your status rising. It could be an equivalent of getting a powerful friend.)
I agree with your evo-psych hypothesis.