I’m going to disagree with this. Honestly, straight up asking can be even more creepy in a lot of situations. For example if you ask, “Can I give you a hug?”, you’ve double creeped me out.
First, you violated my boundaries because we’re not hugging friends yet if ever. Second, you violated my social norms by not reading our friendship hug level from the vibe of our conversation and my body language. You’re right that I may not actually tell you “no” because it is more difficult to opt-out, but that doesn’t make it less creepy.
There are some situations where asking is appropriate, but most of the time I would say if the social cues aren’t clear err on the side of caution and later on ask a buddy who’s good at that stuff what was going on in that situation and if you made the right call. Asking for stuff just tacks awkward onto creepy.
There is a deep, bad problem with “if you can’t read cues, go fuck yourself”. I’m fine with generic norms of what is and isn’t okay to ask: don’t ask to hug someone on your first conversation, don’t ask for anything romantic/sexual outside of certain specific contexts, only ask for things a little more intimate than what’s already approved. You can learn those.
I’m not fine with there being nothing you can do given unclear cues. The cost of two people who wanted to hug not hugging is negligible; the cost of someone being unable of social interaction until someone comes to clue them in is not.
I think the “real norms” are awfully complicated and depend of gender (not only of people, but of whether the present company is all-male, all-female or mixed), status and subtle cues; whereas the “spoken norms” are simpler and give more lip service to our far values by being gender-neutral and not referring to status.
You can probably get along with the simpler spoken rules, but you will miss some opportunities, and may occasionally break an unspoken rule and look bad. How big of a difference it will make will depend of the gap between the spoken and unspoken rules (a small gap for nerds; a larger gap for say European aristocracy).
The articles in the OP seem to try to address this problem mostly by making the “spoken norms” restrictive enough so that you won’t screw up following them, you’ll “only” miss opportunities that would be allowed by the unspoken norms (like hugging given the right cues). Another approach is to close the gap in the other directions by allowing more things to get closer to the spoken norms, e.g. Crocker’s Rules.
It’s an actual language that must be learned and spoken, but a lot of people for some reason never learned it, or learned it poorly.
When these people interact with strangers, it’s exactly like the guy with a bad understanding of a foreign language who tries to speak it, and instead of saying “Hi, are you friendly? Lets be friends!” he says “Hi, I want swallow your head!”
I hope you can see why people wouldn’t like someone who goes around talking like that on a regular basis, and that the problem really does lie with the speaker, not the people he’s speaking to.
What’s worse, if he doesn’t understand what others are trying to tell him (in the language he speaks poorly—aka body language) when he makes these kinds of statements he certainly can remain oblivious to the problem and be unable to fix it himself. If a person in that situation never meets a kind soul willing to help him speak correctly then he really is screwed, and there isn’t much he can do about it unless he recognizes the problem on his own and seeks help.
What kind of help? If you don’t speak a language, you can buy a grammar, or ask native speakers to think up some examples and build rules from them. Whereas if you ask people “How do I know if someone is bored?” they don’t give you actual tips, or even “There’s no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case” and a few examples. They just say “Oh, I can never tell either” when they obviously can, or “Well, they just look and act bored...”.
Impro acting, maybe, or have someone point things out like “don’t you see how impatient he looks?”, etc. - the kind of things parents may do with their kids. Or read a book on etiquette, or hire some kind of body language coach, I’m sure it exists. Or of course a pick-up artist book.
By the way, “There’s no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case” is something I often had to say when teaching French to Chinese students; or rather often it was “there may be a rule underneath all those cases, but I have no idea what it is!”. Often finding the rule for your native language requires significant effort; and some rules you come up may not accurately describe the way the language actually works.
Body language coaching doesn’t just exist, it’s an industry. It is typically associated with public speaking, salesmanship, etc, and there are a lot of places (and books, and online resources, etc) to get training. In fact, one of the linked blogs in the OP, “Paging Dr. NerdLove”, is completely dedicated to helping men who are bad at inter-personal communication with women (i.e. socially awkward) get better at it, which includes quite a lot of body language training.
It’s reasonably well known that body language comprises a significant portion of interpersonal communications, so just like you’d expect with other languages there are quite a lot of resources for learning the language, if you take some time to look for them.
And of course, like any language, the resources are of varying quality and usefulness. But the general idea of “you get what you pay for” holds.
If you don’t speak a language, you can buy a grammar, or ask native speakers to think up some examples and build rules from them.
You do that when you’re a complete beginner, or to polish off your grammar to avoid coming off as uneducated esp. in writing, but the way you actually learn a language well enough to have a conversation without too many misunderstandings by either party is by listening to it (and, when you get a chance, speaking it) a lot. And many of the things you’ll learn this way are things that few grammars will explicitly state and few native speakers will admit. No amount of theoretical study will train your ear to understand speech in real time. You cannot rely on System 2 alone to speak a natural language, as per Moravec’s paradox.
The analogy would be that you learn body language by paying attention to what people who already know it. More generally, ISTM that paying attention to stuff around you (and also paying attention to what you are doing, for that matter) is an oft-neglected skill. (Dear myself-a-few-years-ago, are you listening?)
There is a deep, bad problem with “if you can’t read cues, go fuck yourself”.
What motivation do people with social skills and those norms have to help those with less social skills? Because unless there’s something in it for them they’re not doing it. Many of the kind of people who have social skills find hanging out with the kind of people who don’t actively unpleasant. That is actually overlaps substantially with the way creepy is used; people whose social skills are so low that they are unpleasant to be around in a group, who do not have redeeming features/high status.
Also, other people’s lack of social skills? Mostly not my problem. The only people I would give social skills advice to unsolicited would be those who are clearly likely to be receptive to it, i.e. people who are in a status hierarchy I’m in where I’m superior. Most people who ask for advice don’t want the real thing, and sugarcoating it and getting the real message through is hard.
Do you find this more annoying than other patterns where people lacking X trait and thereby excluded from valuable X-having groups form their own groups, create value within those groups, and then lose control of those groups (and the associated value) to X-havers who appropriate it?
Because it seems to me there are a great many Xes like this. Wealth is an obvious one, for example.
I don’t know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don’t involve malice.
An alternative model is that people with social skills tend to be used to subtle and implicit modes of interaction (guess culture vs. ask culture), and the group’s explicit modes of interaction makes them uncomfortable (giving rise to this thread).
Yet another model that skips step 1): small groups with a homogenous membership will have simple norms; as the group gets successful it grows and attracts more people and more diversity (in age, sex, nationality, and interests), and the simple norms don’t work as well, and “success” in the group depends more and more on being able to handle social complexity (“social skills” and “politics” in the office politics meaning).
I don’t know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don’t involve malice.
Which is why Internet articles are so wonderful. You can give general, detailed, justified advice with many examples, and it’s not a personal attack on anybody in particular.
What motivation do people with social skills and those norms have to help those with less social skills? >Because unless there’s something in it for them they’re not doing it. Many of the kind of people who have >social skills find hanging out with the kind of people who don’t actively unpleasant.
I would say that if the people with the high social skills have the option of removing the people with low social skills from the group then there is little/no incentive to help them beyond perhaps altruism.
But in many situations these mixed groups are forced, and teaching the people with low social skills to interact according to the understood cultural rules can make them more pleasant company. So if you’re continually forced into an environment with someone, improving their social skills can be of direct benefit to you. Examples would include a coworker in a team work environment, a family member or in-law, the roommate or significant other of a valuable friendship, etc.
There is a deep, bad problem with “if you can’t read cues, go fuck yourself”.
I’m not fine with there being nothing you can do given unclear cues. The cost of two people who wanted to hug not >hugging is negligible; the cost of someone being unable of social interaction until someone comes to clue them in >is not.
I don’t think that’s what I was intending to get at. If you can’t read the cues about the appropriateness of a particular course of action then it is advisable to wait until you can ask someone more informed for information about how to act in a future similar situation.
But that doesn’t mean you have to stand there and not participate. For example, let’s say you and I are talking and I’m telling you a story about how something in my immediate environment is causing me to think of something that caused me personal distress in the past. Now for the sake of the example, let’s say that you and I have met a couple times but are not close friends. During the interaction I shift my body to close out the rest of the room and increase the intimacy and exclusivity content of the private conversation between the two of us. Perhaps I even visibly deflate while telling the story, shifting my posture convey a decrease in confidence and happiness.
This is a situation where it might be appropriate to give someone a hug. But if you’re not comfortable reading the cues at the time to determine if this is that kind of situation then I would advise you NOT to ask me right then. Because even though on the surface it may seem as though I have given all the right signals to convey that I would welcome physical comfort, I have not told you anything about the number of other people in the room, the style of clothing being worn by the conversationalists, the presence or absence of mind-altering substances, the relationship statuses of the conversationalists, etc. There are many other factors that could influence whether or not a hug is appropriate here.
And yes, I recognize that in this situation asking “Can I give you a hug” may work out, depending on how “creepily” you ask (and that’s a whole different topic, but body language while asking makes a HUGE difference). But most likely I would find it off-putting and it would increase my desire to removal myself from the situation, because this person has just demonstrated either a lack of understanding or a disregard for the general rules of social interaction in my society.
The thing is, not asking about a hug does not close you off to other alternatives that are much lower risk. For example, you could share a similar story from your personal history. You could voice an offer to listen further if I want to talk more about it. You can ask if I would be more comfortable leaving a situation that I have already indicated is in someway unpleasant to me. And while I recognize that each of those actions could be inappropriate depending on the specifics of a given situation, they are much lower risk. And if you’re unsure, defaulting to the lower risk interaction option is generally preferable. Plus, like I said, you can always recount the situation later on LessWrong and ask if in the future given those parameters a hug would have been ok.
At Bicon in the UK, the code of conduct requires that people ask before touching. People hug a lot there, but they nearly always ask (unless they know each other well). It doesn’t seem at all creepy because it’s a community norm.
I think it’s generally an excellent system. Once you’ve asked a lot of people an occasional no* doesn’t hurt. And generally, people haven’t seemed offended when I’ve said no to them.
*It’s important to remember that no doesn’t necessarily mean “go away you creep.” Some people don’t enjoy hugs.
I say in another reply here that I’m a fan of reframing for active consent and opt-in. I don’t ask “can I give you a hug” for precisely the reasons you say.
If it’s not clear to me if we’re on hugging terms or not, then I assume we’re not. Cost to me if wrong about that = low.
If I have high confidence that we’re on hugging terms, but I don’t know if you feel like it right now, and I have high confidence that we’re on terms where asking this is ok, I’ll ask “would you like me to hug you?” That’s an implied “at this particular time”, and not used for escalating from non-hugging to hugging. If I have doubt on any of these points, I don’t ask. Cost to me if I’m wrong about that = low.
Perhaps it asks a lot in terms of social/people/communication skills to model if processing the question will be costly, or if the cost to them is high for me asking when perhaps I shouldn’t have. It doesn’t particularly seem so, to me.
TL;DR : costs to you in me asking when I shouldn’t are higher than the costs to me of not asking when it would’ve been ok. I’m ok with that asymmetry—privilege is profoundly asymmetric.
Indeed. Expected utility maximization (using a TDT-like decision theory so as to not defect in prisoners’ dilemmas), keeping in mind that one of the possible actions is gathering more information. We’re on Less Wrong after all.
For example if you ask, “Can I give you a hug?”, you’ve double creeped me out.
It seems to me that if we update to be less creeped out by people asking for permission that we don’t end up granting, we will make it safer for people to ask for permission. This means that ① some people who might otherwise not hug, but whom we would like hugs from, might be more likely to ask and thence to hug; and ② some people who might hug without asking will instead ask and take no for an answer.
So, encouraging asking will get us ① more wanted hugs, and ② fewer unwanted hugs.
I’m going to disagree with this. Honestly, straight up asking can be even more creepy in a lot of situations. For example if you ask, “Can I give you a hug?”, you’ve double creeped me out.
First, you violated my boundaries because we’re not hugging friends yet if ever. Second, you violated my social norms by not reading our friendship hug level from the vibe of our conversation and my body language. You’re right that I may not actually tell you “no” because it is more difficult to opt-out, but that doesn’t make it less creepy.
There are some situations where asking is appropriate, but most of the time I would say if the social cues aren’t clear err on the side of caution and later on ask a buddy who’s good at that stuff what was going on in that situation and if you made the right call. Asking for stuff just tacks awkward onto creepy.
There is a deep, bad problem with “if you can’t read cues, go fuck yourself”. I’m fine with generic norms of what is and isn’t okay to ask: don’t ask to hug someone on your first conversation, don’t ask for anything romantic/sexual outside of certain specific contexts, only ask for things a little more intimate than what’s already approved. You can learn those.
I’m not fine with there being nothing you can do given unclear cues. The cost of two people who wanted to hug not hugging is negligible; the cost of someone being unable of social interaction until someone comes to clue them in is not.
I think the “real norms” are awfully complicated and depend of gender (not only of people, but of whether the present company is all-male, all-female or mixed), status and subtle cues; whereas the “spoken norms” are simpler and give more lip service to our far values by being gender-neutral and not referring to status.
You can probably get along with the simpler spoken rules, but you will miss some opportunities, and may occasionally break an unspoken rule and look bad. How big of a difference it will make will depend of the gap between the spoken and unspoken rules (a small gap for nerds; a larger gap for say European aristocracy).
The articles in the OP seem to try to address this problem mostly by making the “spoken norms” restrictive enough so that you won’t screw up following them, you’ll “only” miss opportunities that would be allowed by the unspoken norms (like hugging given the right cues). Another approach is to close the gap in the other directions by allowing more things to get closer to the spoken norms, e.g. Crocker’s Rules.
The heart of the problem is body language.
It’s an actual language that must be learned and spoken, but a lot of people for some reason never learned it, or learned it poorly.
When these people interact with strangers, it’s exactly like the guy with a bad understanding of a foreign language who tries to speak it, and instead of saying “Hi, are you friendly? Lets be friends!” he says “Hi, I want swallow your head!”
I hope you can see why people wouldn’t like someone who goes around talking like that on a regular basis, and that the problem really does lie with the speaker, not the people he’s speaking to.
What’s worse, if he doesn’t understand what others are trying to tell him (in the language he speaks poorly—aka body language) when he makes these kinds of statements he certainly can remain oblivious to the problem and be unable to fix it himself. If a person in that situation never meets a kind soul willing to help him speak correctly then he really is screwed, and there isn’t much he can do about it unless he recognizes the problem on his own and seeks help.
What kind of help? If you don’t speak a language, you can buy a grammar, or ask native speakers to think up some examples and build rules from them. Whereas if you ask people “How do I know if someone is bored?” they don’t give you actual tips, or even “There’s no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case” and a few examples. They just say “Oh, I can never tell either” when they obviously can, or “Well, they just look and act bored...”.
Impro acting, maybe, or have someone point things out like “don’t you see how impatient he looks?”, etc. - the kind of things parents may do with their kids. Or read a book on etiquette, or hire some kind of body language coach, I’m sure it exists. Or of course a pick-up artist book.
By the way, “There’s no rule, you have to learn it case-by-case” is something I often had to say when teaching French to Chinese students; or rather often it was “there may be a rule underneath all those cases, but I have no idea what it is!”. Often finding the rule for your native language requires significant effort; and some rules you come up may not accurately describe the way the language actually works.
Body language coaching doesn’t just exist, it’s an industry. It is typically associated with public speaking, salesmanship, etc, and there are a lot of places (and books, and online resources, etc) to get training. In fact, one of the linked blogs in the OP, “Paging Dr. NerdLove”, is completely dedicated to helping men who are bad at inter-personal communication with women (i.e. socially awkward) get better at it, which includes quite a lot of body language training.
It’s reasonably well known that body language comprises a significant portion of interpersonal communications, so just like you’d expect with other languages there are quite a lot of resources for learning the language, if you take some time to look for them.
And of course, like any language, the resources are of varying quality and usefulness. But the general idea of “you get what you pay for” holds.
You do that when you’re a complete beginner, or to polish off your grammar to avoid coming off as uneducated esp. in writing, but the way you actually learn a language well enough to have a conversation without too many misunderstandings by either party is by listening to it (and, when you get a chance, speaking it) a lot. And many of the things you’ll learn this way are things that few grammars will explicitly state and few native speakers will admit. No amount of theoretical study will train your ear to understand speech in real time. You cannot rely on System 2 alone to speak a natural language, as per Moravec’s paradox.
The analogy would be that you learn body language by paying attention to what people who already know it. More generally, ISTM that paying attention to stuff around you (and also paying attention to what you are doing, for that matter) is an oft-neglected skill. (Dear myself-a-few-years-ago, are you listening?)
What motivation do people with social skills and those norms have to help those with less social skills? Because unless there’s something in it for them they’re not doing it. Many of the kind of people who have social skills find hanging out with the kind of people who don’t actively unpleasant. That is actually overlaps substantially with the way creepy is used; people whose social skills are so low that they are unpleasant to be around in a group, who do not have redeeming features/high status.
Also, other people’s lack of social skills? Mostly not my problem. The only people I would give social skills advice to unsolicited would be those who are clearly likely to be receptive to it, i.e. people who are in a status hierarchy I’m in where I’m superior. Most people who ask for advice don’t want the real thing, and sugarcoating it and getting the real message through is hard.
What I find really annoying is the following dynamic:
1) not allowed into existing groups, people without social skills form their own group
2) said group acquires higher status (largely because people without social skills frequently have other useful skills)
3) people with social skills notice the new group with rising status and start joining it
4) said high-social-skills people use their skills to acquire high positions in the group and start kicking the original low-social-skills people out
This more-or-less describes the history of geek/nerd culture over the past several decades.
Do you find this more annoying than other patterns where people lacking X trait and thereby excluded from valuable X-having groups form their own groups, create value within those groups, and then lose control of those groups (and the associated value) to X-havers who appropriate it?
Because it seems to me there are a great many Xes like this. Wealth is an obvious one, for example.
I don’t know enough about geek culture to tell how closely that model fits reality; but it looks plausible. I have some doubts about step 4), I prefer explanations that don’t involve malice.
An alternative model is that people with social skills tend to be used to subtle and implicit modes of interaction (guess culture vs. ask culture), and the group’s explicit modes of interaction makes them uncomfortable (giving rise to this thread).
Yet another model that skips step 1): small groups with a homogenous membership will have simple norms; as the group gets successful it grows and attracts more people and more diversity (in age, sex, nationality, and interests), and the simple norms don’t work as well, and “success” in the group depends more and more on being able to handle social complexity (“social skills” and “politics” in the office politics meaning).
I never said step 4) involve malice.
“Malice” may have been a bit strong; maybe it’s something like “I prefer explanations that don’t imply moral blame for one of the parties involved”.
I only provide the explanation, assigning blame or other moral elements is up to you.
Whining about it doesn’t strike me as the thing to do. Trying to adapt to it in the short term and/or to fix it in the long term would be better IMO.
Well, one component of fixing this dynamic is drawing people’s attention to it. Especially people who may be unknowingly perpetuating it.
Yes.
Which is why Internet articles are so wonderful. You can give general, detailed, justified advice with many examples, and it’s not a personal attack on anybody in particular.
I would say that if the people with the high social skills have the option of removing the people with low social skills from the group then there is little/no incentive to help them beyond perhaps altruism.
But in many situations these mixed groups are forced, and teaching the people with low social skills to interact according to the understood cultural rules can make them more pleasant company. So if you’re continually forced into an environment with someone, improving their social skills can be of direct benefit to you. Examples would include a coworker in a team work environment, a family member or in-law, the roommate or significant other of a valuable friendship, etc.
I don’t think that’s what I was intending to get at. If you can’t read the cues about the appropriateness of a particular course of action then it is advisable to wait until you can ask someone more informed for information about how to act in a future similar situation.
But that doesn’t mean you have to stand there and not participate. For example, let’s say you and I are talking and I’m telling you a story about how something in my immediate environment is causing me to think of something that caused me personal distress in the past. Now for the sake of the example, let’s say that you and I have met a couple times but are not close friends. During the interaction I shift my body to close out the rest of the room and increase the intimacy and exclusivity content of the private conversation between the two of us. Perhaps I even visibly deflate while telling the story, shifting my posture convey a decrease in confidence and happiness.
This is a situation where it might be appropriate to give someone a hug. But if you’re not comfortable reading the cues at the time to determine if this is that kind of situation then I would advise you NOT to ask me right then. Because even though on the surface it may seem as though I have given all the right signals to convey that I would welcome physical comfort, I have not told you anything about the number of other people in the room, the style of clothing being worn by the conversationalists, the presence or absence of mind-altering substances, the relationship statuses of the conversationalists, etc. There are many other factors that could influence whether or not a hug is appropriate here.
And yes, I recognize that in this situation asking “Can I give you a hug” may work out, depending on how “creepily” you ask (and that’s a whole different topic, but body language while asking makes a HUGE difference). But most likely I would find it off-putting and it would increase my desire to removal myself from the situation, because this person has just demonstrated either a lack of understanding or a disregard for the general rules of social interaction in my society.
The thing is, not asking about a hug does not close you off to other alternatives that are much lower risk. For example, you could share a similar story from your personal history. You could voice an offer to listen further if I want to talk more about it. You can ask if I would be more comfortable leaving a situation that I have already indicated is in someway unpleasant to me. And while I recognize that each of those actions could be inappropriate depending on the specifics of a given situation, they are much lower risk. And if you’re unsure, defaulting to the lower risk interaction option is generally preferable. Plus, like I said, you can always recount the situation later on LessWrong and ask if in the future given those parameters a hug would have been ok.
At Bicon in the UK, the code of conduct requires that people ask before touching. People hug a lot there, but they nearly always ask (unless they know each other well). It doesn’t seem at all creepy because it’s a community norm.
I think it’s generally an excellent system. Once you’ve asked a lot of people an occasional no* doesn’t hurt. And generally, people haven’t seemed offended when I’ve said no to them.
*It’s important to remember that no doesn’t necessarily mean “go away you creep.” Some people don’t enjoy hugs.
I do agree with everything you say here.
I say in another reply here that I’m a fan of reframing for active consent and opt-in. I don’t ask “can I give you a hug” for precisely the reasons you say.
If it’s not clear to me if we’re on hugging terms or not, then I assume we’re not. Cost to me if wrong about that = low.
If I have high confidence that we’re on hugging terms, but I don’t know if you feel like it right now, and I have high confidence that we’re on terms where asking this is ok, I’ll ask “would you like me to hug you?” That’s an implied “at this particular time”, and not used for escalating from non-hugging to hugging. If I have doubt on any of these points, I don’t ask. Cost to me if I’m wrong about that = low.
Perhaps it asks a lot in terms of social/people/communication skills to model if processing the question will be costly, or if the cost to them is high for me asking when perhaps I shouldn’t have. It doesn’t particularly seem so, to me.
TL;DR : costs to you in me asking when I shouldn’t are higher than the costs to me of not asking when it would’ve been ok. I’m ok with that asymmetry—privilege is profoundly asymmetric.
Indeed. Expected utility maximization (using a TDT-like decision theory so as to not defect in prisoners’ dilemmas), keeping in mind that one of the possible actions is gathering more information. We’re on Less Wrong after all.
It seems to me that if we update to be less creeped out by people asking for permission that we don’t end up granting, we will make it safer for people to ask for permission. This means that ① some people who might otherwise not hug, but whom we would like hugs from, might be more likely to ask and thence to hug; and ② some people who might hug without asking will instead ask and take no for an answer.
So, encouraging asking will get us ① more wanted hugs, and ② fewer unwanted hugs.
When it comes to hugging you can to ask nonverbally. You look at the person and open your arms in prepartion of the hug.
If the reciprote the gesture, you hug them. Otherwise you don’t.