Time for some wild speculation

[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.

Comments

[bobsiow.livejournal.com]

i'm pretty sure that's the underlying issue with social disorders, as well as general social awkwardness.

eg. inherent lack of empathy in people with asperger's syndrome. depending on how severe the case, they generally have trouble picking up on tonal and visual cues.

i read an article a couple of years ago about studies in using scripted-television/videos to help develop the social skills of people with autism.

[bobsiow.livejournal.com]

also i know you were drawing a connection with 'nerds', but i have to say that i suspect many a socially-awkward nerd is in fact somewhat autistic.

i'd also say that the arguably-autistic tendency to fixate on facts, order and logic would explain their chosen disciplines of study as well.

[mme-n-b.livejournal.com]

This would also explain why nerds seem to have been nearsighted since childhood more often than the average person. It's actually the other way around - nearsighted children lack the visual clues to learn, and so are more likely to be nerds.

I'm not sure ...

[(Anonymous)]

... it's necessarily visual learning which is at fault. Often nerds are very good visual learners - e.g. at absorbing the written word through their eyes. I think it's actually auditory learning which is more linked to empathy. People who learn better from real people lecturing rather than skipping class and reading the course notes at home. I think. Not sure I contributed to the overall debate, but at least I put a non-critical point half-way to bed.

Re: I'm not sure ...

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Ah, but my point was that nerds often don't look at people due to isolation and social anxiety, so they don't get as many chances to observe faces and body language. Auditory cues kind of suck compared to visual, as shown by the way that most people find it more difficult to read mood and turn-taking cues over the phone.

Re: I'm not sure ...

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed, but I'm also not sure that socially anxious people are denied opportunities to observe social behaviour. I think it's more that when you are socially anxious, you don't feel entitled to participate in social behaviour and/or you believe that social behaviour is somehow wrong. Socially confident people can make the most out of a trip to the supermarket. Socially anxious people could be at the hottest party in town and convince themselves that they must stare at a wall at the back until they are allowed to go home.

Re: I'm not sure ...

[erratio.livejournal.com]

My own experience is that there's some of both going on. Some nerdy types genuinely find implicit social rules to be difficult to pick up (for whatever reason - I don't think I agree with my original theory anymore), which leads to negative feedback when they get it wrong, which in turn leads to a lot of uncertainty in new situations. But you're definitely right that a larger part of it is about just not being afraid, more than knowing the right signals. I've known people who blatantly break social conventions all the time but still get along with others just fine.

Oh and tangentially, social anxiety blocks the ability to learn social cues - the brain does not learn well while distressed, and if you're distressed every time you're in a social situation then you could be staring at the most skilled person the entire time and not learn a single thing about how they do it.