erratio

I was thinking about nerds and social skills. Specifically, the way that nerds (and other classes of socially inept people) tend to have poor social skills because there are two sets of rules on how to behave in social situations. The first is the conventional set, which everyone hears: just be yourself and people will like you, people value honesty and morality over expediency and selfishness, and so on. The second set isn't usually explicitly handed out, and mostly consists of caveats or outright contradictions to the conventional wisdom: being yourself actually means the parts of yourself which are generally pleasant for other people, people are hypocritical a lot of the time and will generally dislike you for pointing it out or acting in a way that makes them feel immoral by comparison, hinting about what you want is often more acceptable than asking for it outright, and so on.

The main difference between people who are socially skilled and those who are unskilled is that the skilled people implicitly learn the second set of rules by observing the people around them, while the unskilled people only have the first, and end up confused and frustrated that the rules they were taught don't work very well in most situations.

My theory out of this is that maybe the unskilled people just aren't visual learners. Learning the second, real set of social rules involves being sensitive to other people's expressions and body language, so that you can modify your own behaviour in response. If for whatever reason you just don't look at people's faces all that much or you're not sensitive to shifts in body language then the only extra information you'll have available is how people say things, which means you have to be at least twice as good at picking up that kind of information than someone who has both channels available to draw the same conclusions about what people are really communicating.

Let's say Person A is doing something that is annoying/inconvenient to you. They do it often enough that it's not something you can easily ignore. It's not imperative that they stop this behaviour but it does grate on your nerves a bit and you would be happier if they didn't do it. How would you deal with it?

A. Say nothing to A. It's not that big a deal after all and not worth the trouble of a confrontation
B. Say nothing to A but complain about it to friends/acquaintances/LJ. It's not a huge deal but better to vent your feelings somewhere safe than make it into a bigger problem.
C. Say nothing to A then explode at them X amount of time down the road. You don't want to bitch about it behind their back because it's rude/your problem to deal with/it might get back to them/it seems like such a small thing to complain about but if A does it again while you're in the wrong mood or they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it then, well, you're only human after all, and you didn't really mean to yell at them.
D. Say something to someone else and get them to mediate between you and A. It'll be easier to talk about with a third party there who isn't involved in the behaviour.
E. Mention in to A but casually, lightly, or only in passing. Hopefully they'll pick up on it and address it without it turning into a confrontation.
F. Talk about it with A using polite, tactful language. They should realise that this is something they should address, but there's no need to throw it in their face and/or back them into a corner about it.
G. Be completely honest with A. If there's a problem there's no point trying to whitewash it. Better to confront it now than let it fester.
H. Something else not listed here

It's times like this I wish I had a paid account so I could post proper polls.

Anyway, I've tried to list all the methods I can think of and the rationale for using them. Obviously I agree with some more than others, and I'm almost 100% sure that no one ever intends to do C ;) And there are drawbacks to virtually all of them that I can think of that I haven't listed. But mostly I'm interested in a) what your own methods are, and b) what obvious stuff I've missed (and I'm sure I have since I'm fairly socially inept. This is an experiment to see how far I am in understanding other people's motivations)