I didn’t want to be this harsh, but I agree. The first thing I thought when I read the "other people don’t understand ‘normalization’ " anecdote was, “Oh yes they do.”
If I were talking to a group of people whose background I didn’t know, I would just say, “There will be more angry phone calls at noon because there are more phone calls at noon total.” Maybe I’m smarter because I know that the mental calculation to get there is called ‘normalization’, but I’m sure folks in the audience are smarter than me because they know other different vocabulary words that I don’t.
Is it more important that you know what a math term means or that you know how to communicate effectively with your colleagues?
I find alcohol to a very good social lubricant. That said, a typical night out at bar usually ends with a serious discussion on aesthetics or evolutionary biology.
That said, maybe if there are enough socially “awkward” people around, we’ll form our own group.
I agree to an extent. I’m just having a hard time understanding “empathy” in this context.
Example: I have a coworker who regularly drives me crazy. She talks too much, which is a pet peeve of mine, but also only talks about insanely minute details of her life plus sexual TMI. And she is a big complainer and whiner. So when she bops into my office to chat, I have to brace myself. I know she’s going to talk about her sexual escapades from the weekend, give me a run-down of what she’s had for breakfast, what she has for lunch, and what she’s going to have for dinner, and/or talk about how ugly/fat/lonely/insert-a-negative-quality she is. She won’t ask me any questions about myself or talk about current events or anything that’s remote interesting. It will all be about her.
I have tried mightily to tolerate her and to be nice. To be a friend. I have tried to be empathetic, thinking perhaps her being an only child is why she seems to think her world is so interesting to other people. Or perhaps because she’s probably the most intelligent person in her family, she’s used to no one in authority telling her to shut her goddamn trap and quit whining–as would have happened in my family. She’s been told to knock off the complaining by multiple people–including our boss–but hard habits are hard to break, I guess.
Well, the other day I almost lost it. She was complaining, for the eleventy-billionth time–about how small and pathetic her breasts were. She. Would. Not. Stop. She had kinda guilt-tripped me into eating lunch with her, and this was what I was being subjected to! A whine fest about her B cups.
Oh wait! Did I mention that I have A cups! Really small As. In fact, my breasts are so small that I don’t even wear a bra unless I’m wearing a form-fitting shirt. It was like she was whining about a paper cut to a person with a missing finger!
I snapped at her to stop and consider who the hell she was talking to. Of course, she had an explanation for why I shouldn’t be offended. She’s fat. Apparently having small boobs and being fat is worse than being rail thin and having tiny boobs. I wanted to scream. Instead I walked out of there and told myself I’m not going to be guilted into eating with her again.
So empathy, like sympathy, is a finite commodity. If you’ve been already told that you suck as a conversationalist and that you should do XYZ if you don’t want to drive people nuts and you don’t do those things, then why should someone have compassion for you? Why should people even bother being polite after a while? In this case, it isn’t me and I’m usually the first to blame myself for failed social interactions. It’s her. She just sucks when it comes to reading a room.
So thinking about this issue some more…I don’t think this is a smart versus average-intelligence thing. I think it’s simply being socially aware. People all throughout the bell curve lack social awareness. The people who are socially aware know how not to come across as dorky eggheads, so they don’t ping on the “genius” radar…even though that’s what they may be. And they probably don’t ping on the “dumb” radar either. They simply appear “average”. People who are smart or dumb and also lack social awareness don’t know how to blend in and so stand out on our minds. However, we give less intelligent people a pass because they aren’t supposed to know better. We have higher expectations of the super intelligent.
I went to a private school for gifted children, and most people weren’t nerds. There certainly was a group of them (us), but they (we) were shunned and picked on by the “popular” ones only slightly less than what I’ve heard happens at most places. Those interested in nerdy things weren’t all socially awkward either, they just were interested in things outside the mainstream. There are only a very few people that went to my school that I would feel had a social awkwardness that’s stereotypically associated with “smart people”, although I definitely include myself. For those people, I definitely think there is something different about them that makes them quite hard to process social encounters, and they get labeled with some sort of psychological condition.
I think a lot of what people think of as “stereotypically smart” is actually “stereotpyical Asperger syndrome” when they really are completely unrelated. People will notice the lack of social ability in someone who is otherwise mentally adept and due to the ability of Aspies to focus on a subject will come across as more intelligent. That is, their brain’s structure will enable them to do some tasks involving logic and exactness that are associated with those of higher intelligence while being unable to understand non-exact situations.
Thus a condition that makes people appear smart also makes them more likely to be socially awkward. That doesn’t mean that people that are actually of above average intelligent are always socially awkward; you just tend to not notice socially competent people that are actually intelligent.
I know lots of dumb people, and almost all of them are socially awkward. In fact, a socially adept dumb guy is almost impossible. But when a dumb guy or an average guy is socially awkward, people expect it. When some dumb broad drones on and on about her grandchildren and medical problems, well, that’s just what dumb boring people do. She doesn’t realize nobody else cares because she’s an idiot.
When a smart guy drones on and on about multivariate analysis, then you start feeling bad for him. Why doesn’t he pay attention to his audience? He’s not an idiot, so why doesn’t he realize that nobody cares except him?
So it’s an example of confirmation bias. Intelligence and social skills are strongly positively correlated. So we notice the socially awkward smart guy because that’s not typical, whereas we forget about the socially awkward dumb guy because that’s what we expect.
I have been talking to someone that I am very attracted to. I like him very much. He is very educated, intelligent, and ambitious. I am having a difficult time “connecting” with him because of his logical and unemotional nature. He has never been good with women and he often comes across as weird. We discuss personal issues via the telephone only. When sex is brought up, he says it is “fine” as if he isn’t even interested in it. He thinks about things too deeply and doesn’t allow himself to be vulnerable enough to love or be loved. What could he be feeling? (Thinking) What would he be afraid of? I am very emotional, affectionate, and demonstrative in romantic relationships. He is like a corpse at a birthday party. I don’t know what to do to help him feel safe. I want him to relax and let go a little. Any ideas? Suggestions? Anyone?
Social skills are learned. Smart kids, especially those that the school makes a fuss over, are often picked on or reviled by their peers. When do you get a chance to learn how to interact with people when your cohort only interacts with you by throwing things at your head during recess?
The adults are also typically not helpful. Many of them struggle to reconcile the idea of higher mathematics with the idea that the person spouting the mathematics is seven years old. Either they treat you as a kid and brush aside any intellectual component to the conversation, forgetting that you really do understand what you’re saying, or they latch onto the intellectual component and talk to you like they expect you to be an adult, forgetting that you are in fact only seven.
There were literally zero people available for me to have real conversations with, and therefore actually bond with, until I got to high school and met up with the other little aliens in the collected gifted & talented program. Zero people over the age of thirty took me seriously in any respect until I was in college. Were it not for the internet, there were big chunks of my teenage years where I wouldn’t have had any positive social contact at all.
It got to be a sort of self-reinforcing cycle after a while. I couldn’t really figure out why nobody would talk to me, because nobody would talk to me long enough for me to figure it out. I eventually fixed it by seeking out other smart kids, who thought like I did and with whom I could have reasonable interactions, and hammering at the problem with the same brainpower I use on everything. I’m still sometimes accused of being loud and blunt about things, but “awkward”, I haven’t heard in years.
IMO, for the vast majority of people social skills can be learned. Yeah, maybe your childhood and early adulthood years were hell because you were Dougy Howser or some such. But if you are an adult now I think you can learn to not be socially awkward. Yeah, you might not turn into the life of the party but you should be able to get past the “damn that person is weird” phase.
As a kid I was very shy. That certainly did not help with my social skills because I wasn’t doing much socializing. I had a handful of close friends and that was it. Now, I wasn’t miserable but I certainly wasn’t very social. And women? Holy molly, a slightly different turn or two in my life and the 40 year old virgin movie could have been my life story (minus the guy finally getting laid part).
But as an adult I forced myself to interact with others. And here’s how I manage to have conversations with people that I don’t have anything in common with. I ask them about something they know.
Meeting someone who is a lawyer? Surely you’ve got a question that would both interest you and would be in their field. Like “That law thingy X on Law and Order. How true is that?”.
An actor? “Okay you were in that series Y. Was that the one with actor Z in it? Is he as nice as he appears to be? How hard was it working on that series”?
A geologist? “Hey, when we were out west we saw these really pretty green rocks. What makes em green?”
A college professor? “Man, I bet you get some really funny papers turned in”
A doctor? “Hey that whole make the interns stay awake 4 days straight while making important medical decisions seems pretty dangerous to me. Whats the reasoning behind it and what do you think?”
Someone from Portland? "Man, I get depressed as hell if its cloudy for 3 days straight. Is Portland as bad as I think it is?
A retired pro football player? "How sore were you after a major game? What did you love about it? What did you hate about it? What’s most people’s biggest misconception about it?
If you are smart enough and curious enough you should be able to find something both of you can talk about and you’ll both have a pleasant conversation. But given all the smart people here that shouldn’t be a problem
If I was at a party and asked everyone a question about their occupation (to the geologist, “Why are rocks green?”, to the astronomer, “Why do the stars twinkle?”, to the basketball player, “How does it feel to score a basket?”), I am pretty sure I will look a little odd. But no one will tell me this. I may have some conversations that are satisfying to me, but I may leave some “failed” ones in my wake without knowing it.
There are no fixed rules to being socially competent. I’m not saying it’s an inborn knack, either you have it or you don’t. But it’s not something that someone can be schooled in, especially with an “It’s easy!” attitude.
I am sure I looked socially awkward at the tupperware party I attended yesterday. Why wouldn’t I? I don’t use Tupperware, since I don’t cook. Everyone was excited about those little doodads, and all I could do is just sit and smile. I played the little auction game and flipped through the catalog. I enjoyed myself, but I wasn’t really “in” the party.
Towards the end, someone called me into the other room and said they felt bad seeing me just “sitting and smiling”.
So I was socially awkward. And the thing is, beyond inventing a false self and persona, I don’t know how I could have “fixed” myself.
Put me in a different environment, though, and I would have fit in better.
Well in her defense, as a guy who likes a lady with a little chub on her and likes a nice big handful of breast, I would be less prone to find her physically attractive.
Overweight with some in the right places, yummy, overweight with none in the right places, meh.
Though I don’t know for sure if there’s really a correlation between smarts and social awkwardness, this describes my own experience pretty well. I’m thinking it may be sort of a “vicious cycle” type thing where someone who is singled out as having “smart person” interests gets singled out at an early age, and this makes their socially awkward qualities more noticeable.
IME, this is a common paradigm for anyone different enough to get singled out, if that difference is something separate from the social awkwardness that persists regardless of the other stuff. Smartness is like that, but so is autism, being hearing-impaired, belonging to a family that hews to a very different culture or religion than is common in the area, etc. Lots of things.
That’s also why this kind of social awkwardness can clear up in a relative hurry with a move to a new school and a new cohort who doesn’t know what everyone thought of him five years ago in kindergarten. It doesn’t always; sometimes the deficit is more than the kid can overcome in a brief enough time for initial weirdness to be chalked up to being the ‘new kid’. And sometimes the kid has dug his feet in and decided it’s unfair he’s expected to change and the other kids are not, and they can go to hell.
It also gets better as you get older and have more freedom to relocate yourself physically away from the people who, to put it charitably, are not giving you any useful feedback.
Your situation sounds much like that of a friend of mine, who did her damndest to bring her guy out of his shell. She managed to get him to fall in love with her, which completely freaked him out and caused him to hole up and refuse to speak to her. She gave up on him. Her guy probably had some kind of Asperger’s type problem. Yours might too, or some other psychological difficulty. My advice is, decide whether you like him just the way he is, because chances are, what you see is what you get.
I think it’s complicated. I’m a socially ungifted person, and it comes from different directions. I grew up lonely, shy, gifted, and picked on both in my family (“identified patient”) and at school (“friendless victim”). I was in my early twenties before I really understood that when someone said something nice to me, they weren’t setting me up for ridicule. Also my mother is strange, and felt extremely threatened by questions. Okay, maybe just threatened by me asking questions. So I grew up with a very strong fear of asking questions, the more personal the worse the fear. This has been very hard to unlearn, and since questions are a universal social icebreaker, it’s a stumbling block.
I am also a classic introvert and social interaction exhausts me. The more people, and the less affinity I feel for them, the more exhausting it is. Small talk with strangers is pretty much the definition of exhausting. Also, no payoff; it is simultaneously boring and strenuous and exhausting. So, naturally, I am fairly bad at it as I avoid practicing this reward-free activity.
My social skills have all been consciously learned, slowly and painfully, as an adult, because I didn’t pick them up as a child. Learning how to fit your conversation to your company is a social skill. I do try not to use big words, big concepts, or challenge people’s assumptions in most situations. I still have to force myself to ask questions, but the truth is, most people have a lot of boring things to say, which I don’t particularly want to hear. So the reward in asking questions is often only that I can congratulate myself on not talking too much.
It’s a joy to be around people who don’t need to be protected that way. These people are rare in real life.
I am probably your classic example of the non-Aspergers socially awkward intelligent introvert. People like me are helped hugely by real peers, with whom they can practice social skills without the difficulty of being Extremely Different From The Get Go.
The way average people get to.
Continuing the hijack: what the hell is it with these people who see someone and think “oh, (s)he’d be great if only…” and set out to change that person?
If he’s happy the way he is, why fix what ain’t broken?
I think most people have some degree of awkwardness at an early age. But social relationships, IMHO, are more a function of proximity than anything else. People learn from and bond with the people they are surrounded by. The kid identified as “gifted” is frequently sequestered in exclusive “gifted” programs or sent off to take university level math classes and whatnot. They may be discouraged from playing organized sports or other activities where they would learn to interact with the littlebrains.
