How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize

How Studying Body Language Changed the Way I Socialize
dearcharlottebook.com

I think what the author is describing is something of a growing trend. It has become relatively easy to make it through to adulthood with very low social intelligence. Society (school and parents, both quite possibly lacking in social intelligence in their own right) reward you for high analytical intelligence, and technologies (videogames for instance) help us function OK without the close groups and social ties which used to be so important in pre-industrial societies. But the further you go into life, the harder it is to proceed, succeed and be happy with a major deficit in social intelligence. Luckily, just as social intelligence is taught implicitly by parents who possess it to their children, so can anyone learn it themselves. It really is a learnable skill! And the shift to valuing it is a good swing of the pendulum back from the excesses of "pure" rationalism (quote marks because a system of rationality that doesn't value geting along with others is not very rational in my books). I think emotional/social literacy is perhaps even more fundamental than our other "traditional" literacies. We've just forgotten the habit as a society of teaching it to our children.

Speaking of books, "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman is fantastic for this stuff. Psychotherapy is also very, very useful (if of course it's with a good therapist).

Edit: One more thing. I was standing outside a computer room after hours at my university recently, trying to get in. There's this swipe card device that you have to swipe your student ID past to unlock the door, and I've always struggled to get this particular device to work, compared to others around campus. So this night while I'm swiping fruitlessly away a girl and a guy come up and stand there waiting for me. After a couple of seconds the girl says "Maybe if you try swiping it in the middle it will help." I do and instantly it works. Problem solved.

What really hit me was the way this girl phrased her comment. I've seen her in this same room many times late at night, and she clearly knew exactly what I was doing wrong. She could easily have achieved the exact same result many other ways - "You need to swipe it in the middle" - "Don't you have any idea what you're doing?" "Here, let me do that" "No, that's wrong, you should do this." Instead she phrased it as a gentle suggestion, without explicitly confirming that it was what I needed to do. Phrasing it that way let me choose to take the suggestion without sacrificing my autonomy, gave me an option to turn the suggestion down without face, and even let me take some of the credit for getting it right.

All in all, it was a deft response to a situation where someone else may easily have caused offence with inconsiderate phrasing. Not a big deal in its own right, but small moments like that stack up. As a result this girl clearly goes through life much more smoothly than the people described in this article. So while maybe she can't blitz a test or an essay like a more analytically-minded person, I think her "soft" skill is incredibly, incredibly valuable - I think analytically-minded people have much to learn from people like her.

In the 8 or so years since then, being thrust into more circumstances where I don't already know everyone, I have really started to notice it. In some ways, (if my hypothesis is true) realizing what the problem is has been a huge relief- I'm no longer mystified about why some people seem to have large social networks, and I have a small one. It's almost like someone finding out they were colorblind, and then realizing that maybe that was the reason they didn't really like some visual art that everyone else seemed to love.

But, I'm still unsure how to approach this problem. This article gives me some hope, but not too many specifics. My working relationships are all excellent, however. Its more just the "hanging out" with people my age, and finding social groups. I suck at that. Does someone with similar experiences want to chime in?

Maybe I'm just addicted to intellectual sparring. Who knows.

The thing that frustrates me, however, is how few people I end up "hanging out" with, and really enjoy the company of. I put that down to a sort of "social fatigue" because of my being an introvert. I'd be curious to see if this is a problem anybody else has managed to conquer.