Social intelligence is valuable but not everyone needs to have it. In any smallish group, you really just need a handful of members with high social intelligence to provide “social lubrication” for the remainder.
I don’t have great social skills in real-time situations, but I can infer motivations pretty well when I think about it a bit, and sometimes take the role of smoothing over relations between others (I’ve found that among otherwise well-intentioned people, the problem usually lies in communication difficulties–what one person hears is not what the other meant).
It depends on your social setting but would it be preferable to fit in/adapt anywhere (my mom once told my sister SHE wouldn’t make friends in rehab like our mom did. Some people can adapt to various groups even undesirable ones when it comes down to it) or is this strictly work and school settings?
I suppose looking after oneself, which is how the op read to me, is a different kettle of fish to being in a social setting where you have no power. When I started my job I definitely didn’t fit in but my boss and her paramour were sociopaths. I over compensated with my next supervisor and co-workers by doing more (their) work. The damage had been done even after I learned the social rules . Social intelligence would be nice to have when people have long memories. Once you take on others work it can be hard to dial it back once you learned what others either picked up previously or already knew.
No, no back patting. Just no real effort on my part, of course I’m 45 and have been this way forever. I think it bothered me a lot more in High School, not being a social butterfly I mean, but hasn’t much since.
If you’re attuned enough to nonverbal signals and social niceities, you’ll learn from a young age what behaviors to avoid through trial and error. But if you’re blind to the social feedback that subtly but constantly bombards us, you can’t judge from someone’s expression that you are boring them to tears or coming across as creepy, hostile, or arrogant. So you never learn not to do the repellent things you’re doing. If you did know you were coming across this way, you’d probably correct it. That you don’t, suggests you’re blind. This view actually makes me more compassionate towards those who have annoying behavioral tendencies.
I have a co-worker in his 50’s who is very nice and friendly, but everyone avoids him because he likes to make small talk about topics that bores everyone to tears. I honestly believe someone could start yawning right in front of his face while he’s jabbering, and he would still not realize his effect on people. He also will do things like double dip when we have refreshments, or start chowing down even if not everyone at his table has been served. His gaffes are probably a result of how he was socialized as a young age mixed with a heaping dose of social blindness which has made him oblivious to his surroundings. I can look at him and tell that his lack of social skills has hurt him, but for all I know, he thinks he is expert in this area. Because really, how would he know? He doesn’t even know double dipping is a faux paus right up there with farting audibly in public or cursing in church.
I think it applies to all settings. However, there are certain settings where a person’s social weaknesses are more ‘obvious’. One of the reasons I value social intelligence is because it lets people adapt to situations they weren’t necessarily prepared to deal with.
There are some people that are very good at following directions. Give them a set of expectations, and they’ll follow them to the letter. They will remember the rules and play within their ruleset very consistently. But present them with a situation that’s not explicity in the rules, and they don’t know what to do. They don’t want to do the wrong thing, but they don’t know what the best thing is either. So they’ll either freeze up, always defer to an authority, etc. In other words, as good as they were about following the rules, they can’t think beyond them, so in a situation that comes up where they aren’t directly relevant, they don’t know what to do. Employees like this seldom have initiative in situations like this, are tied to their superior and often run into situations of ‘why didn’t you do this’ ‘I was waiting for you to tell me what you wanted me to do’.
People with a lot of social intelligence can read between the lines. They can look beyond just a network of rules and try to figure out why those rules are there. So when presented with a situation that doesn’t fall within the rules, they have the initative to do what they think is best, and not hesitate.
Of course there are pros and cons to each type of employee; the rules-centric guy will be better in situations where employees aren’t given a lot of latitute and need to ask permission for everything. The employee who likes to ‘wing it’ is better in situations where problems are abstract and its impossible to prepare an answer for everything ahead of time- its more crucial you can make a good decision vs remembering a prepared one.
These are work type scenarios, but I noticed people like this adapt similarly poorly/well in other social settings. Look at how quickly some people make friends in new locations. I don’t think its necessarily because the person is super extroverted. Its also because some people can think outside a set of rulesets.
Monstro mentioned she enjoys being around people with compassion, and that makes perfect sense. Its nice to be around people that are sympathetic when you are having a hard time, but also smart enough to know when to leave you alone when you are so tired/stressed/etc that you just want the ringing in your ears to die down before having to interact with anyone.
I noticed, though that empathy, compassion, meanness, etc all seem to fall on a continuum. There are some people that have a great amount of empathy, but because they don’t know who really ‘deserves’ it, they get sucked into other people’s drama. You know the people that are always, ‘woe is me’. Emotional vampires, people who crave attention and validation. We all need a little bit here and there, but some people seem to subsist off it from others.
People adapted to a kind of learned helplessness can really take advantage of this. And the most annoying part is when they are told they need to learn to fight their own battles/change their own behavior to stop the problems from happening, they lash out at the other person. One word I’ve avoided using lately is ‘mean’. Saying someone is ‘mean’ is like saying someone is ‘nice’. Its a vague, weak adjective that is far too often abused and misused. People are really quick to say someone was being ‘mean’ to them just because the person was socially intelligent enough to know not to indulge them.
Your coworker who calls you ‘mean’ for not helping her fix the [widget] machine for the fifteenth time, even though you’ve explained exhaustively what to do each time? She is not calling you mean because you are rejecting her pleas for help, she’s calling you mean because you’re not enabling her anymore
I’ve noticed that you like to psychoanalyze, Incubus. I’m curious where you get your ideas from. Because some of them are quite interesting. I also wonder if you share these ideas with people in real life.
I’m all for being assertive and telling annoying people they are annoying. Compassion doesn’t mean being a doormat or putting up with nonsense. But it does mean not dwelling too much on other people’s faults. Or generalizing too much from those faults. I may notice that a person seems to have a poor sense of humor, for instance, but that doesn’t mean they have an overly inflated ego or whatever pathology you want to invent. It may just mean that I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am. How “social” a person is as much a function of their environment as it is their social skills.
Compassion also means accepting people as they are because you’ve accepted yourself the way you are. If I’m not prepared to change my personality to suit the whims of someone else, then why should I expect someone else to change for me?
I don’t know if compassion is a social skill. But it certainly helps a person handle different types of people and situations.
Heh–me too. I wonder if we missed the same ones? I found myself doing the same thing you did, trying to form my face into those shapes.
As I said before, I think there are some sorts of social intelligence I got; apparently this is one of them. A different test might involve someone making a comment and figuring out whether they’re sarcastic, or figuring out the right sort of compliment to offer a stranger to spark a conversation, or something like that; I guarantee I’d do worse at those.
Compassion can be developed, but it takes a lot of work, and it means questioning yourself more deeply than most people do.
I’ve always been an extremely extroverted person - recharged by spending time with others, wear my heart on my sleeve, find that socializing makes any activity better. That doesn’t necessarily translate into social intelligence, though. When I was in college, a pair of friends teased me constantly about being absent-minded and oblivious, and those criticisms really stung. I hated being left out of things because I hadn’t noticed an emotional undercurrent. But, demanding to be included doesn’t fix the problem. Shutting up, paying attention, and mulling things over does. By the time I graduated, I found that I’d grown enormously and more than a few people commented on how adeptly I handled particular situations.
Social intelligence isn’t just about being able to get along with people. It’s about understanding how people function and why, about the boundaries of social interactions, what directions individual variations take and how far they can go before they are out-of-bounds. It’s about understanding one’s own mental and emotional resources and how to husband them, how to do the least harm, and how to effectively help when possible.
If there’s a way to sum up what social intelligence is about, I’d say it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. To be sympathetic is to see someone and do for them what you would want done for you in the same circumstances. To be empathetic is to see someone in pain and understand from their point of view what would and would not help.
And then there’s the issue of actually putting it into practice. I may have scored high on the test, but I don’t think I’ve looked that closely at anyone’s face in the last ten years. And under pressure, I’m certainly not going to “waste time” by stopping to look at your face if we’re in the middle of a project with a deadline. Keep up or get out of the way, but don’t bother me with those silly feelings things. There’s work to be done!
Yeah, you really don’t want to play poker with me. For one thing, I find the statistics far more interesting than the game itself. If a group of people are playing poker, I like watching more than I like playing.
If you do invite me to play… I’m going to screw with your head. Not only do I have the poker face from hell, but I’ll intentionally shift tactics so that as soon as you figure out that I like to fold early, I’ll start bluffing like mad. Fake tells are also a fun way to play mind games.
The only time I played poker for money was at a high school church camp (there’s irony for you). After I’d accumulated $20 in quarters, everyone else started looking for other things to do.
Yeah, the test would be a lot better if it could factor in how much time it took you to get an answer. People with the highest social IQ can do it near instantly.
Even better would be to try to simulate a normal situation, distracting you while its going on, so you’re running on automatic. I know that a lot of times, when I’m busy, all I can really remember of people’s faces is a mental blur.
I got a 28 but that test seemed like some BS. A lot of the choices were similar and many pictures didn’t even seem like an expression, just plain off looking to the side or straight ahead, normal pupil dilation, no furrowed brows, no narrowed eyes, no uplift from the cheeks from a smile or anything, how do you get something from that?
I got 31 out of 36, to my surprise. I felt like I was making random choices about half the time. Plus I was sure all those beautiful women were flirting with me. I wonder whether I’d get a similar result taking it again.
Regardless, I don’t think I have a hard time assessing people’s emotions, when they’re not trying to hide them. But my timing is off, and there are a lot more subtleties than merely reading an expression. Plus, I think I’ve learned to compensate well; the deficit was most striking in grade school. By high school, I was the guy every mother wanted her daughter to date, which didn’t improve my odds much.
