River: small talk

[mdlbear]

I may have occasionally mentioned that I don't seem to be very good at "small talk". (Note that I'm not talking about the programming language Smalltalk here; I can do that.)

Yeah, I know, it's yet another social skill I don't have, and have never been interested in acquiring. But it means that I have no way to hold up my end of a conversation once I run out of things I particularly wanted to say.

Comments

May be in the genes

[kanef.livejournal.com]

I suspect that some people are born social butterflies and quickly learn a culture’s social skills, while others are born with less skill at interaction, or less need for it, or both. Both may even have evolved as an ESS. (Group selection theory, favored in the halls of SF cons but not by evolutionary biologists, would put it this way: Society needs at least a few people capable of tending a lighthouse.)

I noticed an interesting hole in the English language. One can define "loneliness" as "The discomfort felt, for example, by a very extroverted person who is receiving a level of social interaction that a very introverted person would find perfect." Agreed? OK, then what’s the word that means the exact opposite?

There may be a whole continuum of social interaction styles, one of the extreme ends of which has been given names but is still not well understood. Did you read the novel "Wake" serialized in last year’s Analog? The protagonist is a contemporary blind-from-birth teenager who’s extremely active on LiveJournal. Sawyer mentions a number of the more minor things that bother her about being blind, and one of the first things he mentions is that it bothers her to think that people might be looking at her without her knowing it. Another is that her physicist father is maddeningly uncommunicative, and she likes to think that she’s missing all kinds of nonverbal communication: smiles, his loving gazes at her mother, the warm handshake he hopes he gave her date. But later she finds out that her father is autistic and is uncomfortable being looked at, and has trouble meeting people’s eyes. A third character speculates that the protagonist inherited those genes, and no one ever noticed she was socially awkward because no one expects a blind person to look them in the eye. She mentions that her mother trained her to look toward the sound of a voice when someone speaks to her, and is surprised to learn that most blind people do that naturally. Anyway, at one point she asks her father why he never says he loves her, and he points out that he did tell her that several years before. She realizes that from his point of view, since the status had not changed in the meantime there was no reason to mention it again.

Ever since I read The Blank Slate, I’ve come to think that many behaviors are genetic. So people who crave social contact but aren't good at it may be struggling against a disadvantage, compared to people it comes easily to. Which does not mean that it's not possible to improve. Just as a person prone to diabetes can ward it off by being extra careful with diet and exercise, a person with the bad luck to have a craving for social contact but a low aptitude for social skills can work extra hard to learn the skills that others find so easy (or to reduce the craving).

Re: May be in the genes

[mdlbear]

No, I haven't read Wake; may have to add it to the stack.

I think you're right about the combination of a craving for contact and low social skills. I suspect that my aptitude is higher than I give myself credit for, but that I've let many of the skills get rusty, if indeed I ever learned them in the first place.