Notes on social skills

I am not a naturally sociable person: I'm somewhat dour, grumpy and take an interest mostly in weird stuff that other people find it difficult to relate to (to give just one example, as I write this, I've started to work my way through Jomini's Summary of the Art of War to provide a counterpoint to my earlier study of Clausewitz). Nonetheless, during my time trying to start my own consultancy, build a career and live my life in general, I think I've learned the minimal level of social graces, tact and communication skills to get along in life (I still come across better in writing than in person, but the strategic application of good food and drink covers a multitude of sins).

If you've had a similar set of experiences to me, you will likely have observed similar phenomena to me in the workplace. In short, when interviewing for jobs, in a workplace or networking, you quickly begin to find out that your hard-won skills, in most places, don't really count for much. You find out that you "lack relatability", "don't vibe", "aren't a culture fit" and lots more horseshit in this vein. People find themselves confused by you, and even when, in the best case, they're weirdly fascinated and drawn in by that, you're admired and thought very clever and worthy, but not admitted into the inner circle that they're all a part of, to your economic detriment. It's almost as though there's a whole parallel set of social capabilities out there that they're judging you by, to the exclusion of the ones you've so carefully built.

Despite what an awful lot of us like to think, social capability isn't a monolith: there is no one body of skills, knowledge and innate traits that makes you "good at social stuff": rather, there's a whole blob of different things, some innate, some learned formally, some trained and some that you just learn with bitter experience, none of which are universally applicable and all of which can be misapplied. Moreover, they don't all point to the same thing, and many of them are actively in tension with each other. It is clearly true, however, that there is an idea of a gestalt "social skills" that some people have and some people don't, that motivates the behaviour of a lot of people. Whence, then, does the folk idea of "social skills" come from?

The folk gestalt of social skills can't be defined easily as a set of traits or behaviours, as it requires very different behaviours of different people: people of low status are meant to be submissive and deferential, while for people of high status, their power is expected to be used in very particular, fairly rigid ways. The common thread that ties the gestalt together, inasmuch as I can tell, is the idea of "going along to get along", or not being disruptive, not disturbing structures of power too much and generally fitting in with the ways that people interact with each other socially: slipping easily into underlying social structures, as it were.

This isn't entirely a bad thing; after all, for our society to basically function, we do need to get along with people and conform to an extent. This even applies to things that aren't the obvious ones, such as murder or theft generally being bad. After all, if I, in pursuit of non-conformity with society, were to decide that the practice of driving on the left hand side of the road in New Zealand was an artifact of british colonialism and that I thus didn't need to go along with it, I would quickly be disabused of the notion that non-conformity in this element was a good idea. Basic, learned social scripts such as etiquette aren't necessarily a bad thing either: I happen to think that the social conformity required to flush a toilet after using it, as opposed to, say, clogging it up with toilet paper and causing it to overflow, is actually a good thing. Inasmuch as "social skills" means "having the sensitivity and knowledge to go along with the social scripts we need to make society run", then, I think the folk definition has a fair amount to recommend it.

This folk definition of social skills, however, runs into significant issues when introduced into a modern knowledge work economy. First of all, an awful lot of modern knowledge work is fundamentally creative inasmuch as it requires the practitioner to create responses to new problems that arise, where social scripts at best have nothing to say on the subject and at worst actively get in the way of solving the problems at hand. Relatedly, knowledge work involves trying and debating new ideas in ways which will inevitably cause conflict, requiring techniques and capabilities for dealing with conflict that the folk definition, which is oriented about avoiding and defusing conflict, simply isn't equipped to handle. We also run into the issue that, in our current circumstances, an awful lot of folk/commonsense ideas about a lot of things (including precisely many of the things embedded in folk conceptions of social skills) are just flat wrong, and as professionals, we have a duty to make this known and communicate it clearly. It would have been profoundly irresponsible, for example, for doctors and epidemiologists to not have handled the Covid-19 pandemic in the way that they did, despite the fact that in many ways the response involved gross breaches of folk social standards, leading, in large part, to the backlash that has continued up until this point.

This leaves us, socially, at something of an impasse. A lot of people in modern, developed societies engage in knowledge work, including a lot of people whom we probably wouldn't wish to call members of the elite (this last clause is important to note, as members of intellectual elites often have definitions of social skills quite different from the folk conception: I'm a good example of this myself inasmuch as if I tried to conduct myself socially in my local community in the same way that I do in the community of people built around this blog, I would suffer). This means that we have a lot of people who've internalised, as we all have to a greater or lesser extent, the folk conception of social skills, but are placed in a position where that folk conception doesn't work. What are they to do?

The approach that I think would be preferable would be to rewire the conception of social scripts specifically for knowledge work. We are, after all, quite capable of internalising that different spaces have different rules: you behave differently in church from how you behave at home, and differently at work from how you behave with your friends. It should thus be possible to teach people that knowledge work requires a different, specialised set of social skills that you use in that particular space. In fact, one might make the argument that university, in its ideal form, is meant to inculcate the set of social scripts appropriate to learning and knowledge work, and even in its current form it sometimes works a bit. That said, particularly at the undergraduate level, universities have taken on a more vocational cast that doesn't do that work to the same extent, and even a lot of people doing knowledge work these days don't have university degrees in any case.

Still, one way or another, one could imagine a world where we teach people, when they take on a job in knowledge work, to take on a set of etiquette norms and social skills fitted to the work at hand. Being able to disagree effectively, be kind to people and work with them effectively even when you don't like them much and being willing to make the appropriate sacrifices that are sometimes necessary in the course of living in a complex society would all be useful skills to learn towards this end. In an ideal world, in fact, I think something like that would be a wise way of approaching social skills in knowledge work.

Unfortunately, this isn't quite how things have worked out: the actual phenomenon observed seems to be that people think doing that work is too hard, and they, rather than learning a new set of social skills, redraw the lines of what social skill is in a way that's convenient for them.

I've tended to split up social skills in this essay by social setting: I focus, for the most part, on how they differ or should differ across societies, social settings within a society and groupings like that. The issue here, however, is that this means that you have to learn the appropriate social skills for each space that you function in. Moreover, in a lot of knowledge work situations, the social skills needed can change rapidly depending on circumstances, and often have to be developed on the fly as we often run into situations where there really aren't existing rules. That represents a lot of cognitive load, and it's inevitable that a lot of people, especially given that a lot more people are doing knowledge work than previously did, will not have the skill or inclination to take that load on.

A lot of people in knowledge work spaces therefore break down social capability across a different axis: that of innate or inherent traits as opposed to that of learned skills. This is a real fracture line in social skills, and breaking it up in this way isn't necessarily bad: it can certainly be a useful lens for analysis. In this lens, you have two broad groups of social capabilities. The first are inherent inclinations, or personality traits that people exhibit: things like how extroverted you are, how much you smile, how your voice sounds, how you look, markers of social class... all inherent things that might positively or negatively predispose people to you in social situations. Some of them are probably relevant to social skills, such as the ability to read body language effectively or to interpret facial expressions, while others are simply bigotry of the form of trans people being seen, absent any material evidence, as less socially capable than cis people. In any case, these are all things where changing them, if it's at all possible, would require a wide-ranging restructuring of a person's entire personality, which I think we'd argue is generally an unethical undertaking. The second grouping are what we might consider learned social skills: writing and communication skills, relationship repair skills, the ability to pitch communication to the audience you're talking to, perspective-taking (I note that this is subtly but importantly different to empathy as such), cultural sensitivity, tact, grace, the ability to work effectively with people whom you don't much like or don't see eye-to-eye with and the ability to handle conflict in the sphere of what you're doing without overspill.

Both sets of capabilities contribute significantly to the gestalt folk-social-skills construct discussed earlier, and both likewise have areas (usually marginalised) where they conflict with the gestalt. There are, however, also some glaring asymmetries in this split that lead, in general, to outcomes that we wouldn't much like. Most obviously, inherent inclinations are immediately obvious in a way that the learned skills just aren't. To judge someone's cultural sensitivity or skills at relational repair, you need to work with and observe the person for at least a few months, or possibly years for harder things. Even with something like writing or public speaking skills, you need to find samples of people doing that, read them and go through them with a fine comb to make your determination. Making a judgement on all of these things also requires you to understand the social environment that you and the person you're judging are operating in to a considerable degree of depth: you need to know what works, what doesn't and what the rules are, which a startling number of people just don't do. By contrast, the inherent traits are almost all things that you can get a read on within half an hour, and consequently they're much, much more accessible to your average person.

Learned skills are also, as it goes, much more sensitive to environmental factors than inherent temperament is. No matter how good your relationship repair skills are, for example, if you find yourself in a toxic workplace, they're essentially useless. Closer to home, it really doesn't matter how good I am at communicating in spoken or written word in an environment where, quite bluntly, very few people want to listen to what I have to say and where a fair number of people have prior ideological commitments to not letting people like me communicate at all. In an environment where the quality of it is unclear, then, it's impossible to tell whether someone has a deficit in learned social skills or whether they are suffering at the hands of the environment. By contrast, at least initially, temperament is pretty easy to get a handle on, though prolonged exposure to bad environments will still eventually cause changes in it.

With sufficient social stability, these changes are things that we can pretty efficiently overcome, meaning that in places where the relevant learned social skills still change fairly slowly, they remain valid for assessing other peoples' social skills. In church groups, social groups, friendships and personal relationships, these are still very much the things we lean on for judging whether someone's socially well-adjusted or not. However, as we've established earlier, the relevant learned social skills change a lot, often on the fly. For people incapable or unwilling to do the work of keeping up with that, then, temperament and inherent traits steadily become an increasingly large part of how they assess conformity to the folk-social-skills gestalt, which, given the much greater accessibility of trait and temperament compared to learned skills, is to be expected.

This obviously isn't great. Filtering for knowledge workers like this is, to put it bluntly, unlikely to get good results. For starters, and as we've already established, a lot of the learned social skills needed to be good at knowledge work actively stand in opposition to many of the temperamental factors people look for. Cybersecurity specialists, for example, are likely to be quite dour, grumpy and serious-minded individuals: while good ones will be able to communicate what they need to effectively and work without being actively offensive or upsetting people, they're probably never going to be the happy, gregarious people that the inherent-trait filter looks for. Moreover, the gestalt folk-social filter tends to filter against people who will engage in (healthy) conflict, and as we've established, healthy conflict is kinda important in the field of knowledge work.

Filtering against learned skills in the social sphere also has a more pernicious effect in that it creates a bias in knowledge work against learning skills in general. The reason for this becomes clear with a little thought: once you've developed the habit of looking to trait and temperament when assessing someone's social capabilities at the expense of learned skills, the instinct to look for traits everywhere quickly becomes overwhelming. After all, assessing learned skills in fields other than the social isn't exactly much easier than assessing learned skills in a social setting. In the absence of any countervailing pressure, then, people tend not to assess skills but to look for traits that, to a greater or lesser degree, are associated with said skills: you see a lot of this in tech, where manner of dress, political views, choice of tools and languages, willingness to say the right buzzwords and be excited about the right technologies and half a hundred other things are used to try and identify whether someone's a good software engineer rather than, you know, actively evaluating the work they've done.

In this kind of situation, it's questionable whether learning hard skills in any field in depth is actually economically advantageous compared to simply developing the associated traits that make people think you have the skills. Consequently, we have a situation in most modern knowledge work where almost everyone is focused, first and foremost, on cultivating or faking the expression of traits rather than actually learning or getting good at anything. This trait-cultivation then becomes the yardstick by which people gain social status, with the highest positions of power going to the people who can model the appropriate traits most effectively, as opposed to actually developing the skills they need for the role. I think this explains an awful lot about the world we currently live in.

Inherent trait obsession

So far, I've restricted my discussion to the problems of knowledge work: hiring, making a workplace work and all that, and how the models of social skills that we have interfere with that. If that were an end to it, I'd be unhappy, but I think such circumstances might be survivable. Unfortunately, knowledge work has a way of shaping the entire society that contains it: the civil service, after all, engages mostly in knowledge work, and thus if certain attitudes are common to knowledge work, they will inevitably shape the way that the state and its policies reacts. Beyond that, work is what occupies a full 40% of our waking hours, and it's indelibly tied up with the way we think and run our societies. If an important part of the work we do leads us to think and judge in a certain way, that cannot help but shape our wider social sphere. So what, then are we to make of the phenomena observed above?

Put bluntly, many of our societies and institutions have, in the last forty-to-fifty years, developed an intense fixation with inherent traits as being the most important thing about people. Take me, for example. I have a whole bunch of diagnostic traits that would, in this society, be identified with certain forms of neurodivergence. They've inclined me to certain kinds of work, positioned me in certain ways relative to society and lead to me having certain kinds of social interactions and not others. And certainly, in some cases, having a label to put on this grab-bag of traits, responses and so forth would be useful. That said, I can't help but feel that a neurotypical person in my situation, who did my kind of work, with my kind of approach, would face a lot of the same challenges that my putatively neurodivergent self would. In that situation, labelling the experience as an inherent trait is... less than valuable. The way I experience the world isn't a result of a single "neurodivergent" trait inherent to me, but an emergent property of a whole lot of very complex systems involving gender, the culture I'm embedded in, a whole lot of learned skills (including the learned social ones described above), a considerable amount of simple chance and a whole bunch of other things. Given that any interesting social phenomenon is going to be dense in this way (Clausewitz would say that it's a "total system"), while the inherent traits of the people in the system are important, they're absolutely not a determining factor, or even close to one. It would thus be wise to take a step back and not weight the importance of traits more than evidence suggests is appropriate in any given case.

(A note here on gender and my trans identity: the reason this line of argument doesn't apply to that in quite the same way is that a statement of trans identity is quite directly about what social roles you want to occupy and what that should look like: it has, obviously, an inherent trait element, but that, unlike this, isn't the interesting thing about the trans label).

But, as a cursory look over LinkedIn will reveal, we love our inherent traits. It's more comprehensible and easier, in almost all cases, for people to slap an "autistic" label or some other one onto a person than to observe a set of often complex environmental interactions over a long period. Trait-based identity groupings can be useful, and in general, leaning on trait and temperament over anything learned or developed over time is much easier on people than doing the hard work. Even when we actively try work against this tendency, we find ourselves doing it: Carol Dweck's work on fixed and growth mindsets is, when diffused into the wider patterns of knowledge work, focused on the development of traits much more than the learning of skills and, ironically enough, often treats fixed and growth mindsets as themselves being fixed traits. Even in our politics, we focus hard on our politicians being the right kind of person rather than having the skills needed to do politics effectively. The stress is on leaders having the traits associated with good leadership, which means, for example, that Christopher Luxon, being by all accounts a stand-up New Zealand bloke with common sense and so forth, got elected Prime Minister despite having driven several companies into the ground, most recently our national airline.

This poses two major issues for the current social moment. Firstly, skills are not, in fact, the same thing as inherent traits, you can't consistently judge one from the other, and you actually really want skilled people doing all kinds of knowledge work. Luxon's awful financial management of firstly Air New Zealand and then the New Zealand economy as a whole are excellent evidence of that, and, to return briefly to the more restricted lens we were taking earlier, is also excellent evidence that learned social skills and inherent traits that we associate with socially capable people have remarkably little overlap: most of us, after all, would have more tact than to try and deflect questions about our property portfolio by saying that we're "wealthy" and "sorted" while leading a country going through the worst recession since 2008, and one that, at that, was artificially induced by the reserve bank at a time when said reserve bank is under significant scrutiny regarding violations of their statutory independence. There is no way in which this is a person with good social skills, and yet, under the trait-based model, he's probably considered a person with better "social skills" than 95% of the people reading this. The point is, for a lot of things, you cannot substitute trait for skill and hope to get a good result, and as a result of us having done this for a considerable length of time, things are breaking on a massive scale. You can't run a country or a company on the basis of vibes, and yet this has consistently been how we've been doing it, and the cracks are really showing.

More subtly, this trait fixation makes it difficult for us to think or reason effectively about systems and interactions. Trait and temperament, as we've previously discussed, are significantly less sensitive to environmental conditions than skills are, and skills, in fact, almost always exist relative to an environment. To de-emphasise learned skill in favour of trait-based judgements, then, is to de-emphasise the importance of environments and circumstance in how we think about the world more generally. Our recent challenges, however, are almost all challenges of circumstance and environment: our straitened economic circumstances, the climate crisis and the recent and ongoing Covid-19 pandemic are all excellent examples of this. It's difficult to stress enough how useless a trait-based approach to any of these problems would be: the most offensive example of this in action is punitive actions taken towards unemployed people by governments in a recession economy, as though the negative traits of sloth, laziness or stupidity among the unemployed was solely responsible for unemployment and the systemic lack of jobs has nothing to do with it. Actually getting a country out of a recession takes a significant amount of skill in the running of a state's monetary and fiscal policy, often requires (as with so many skills) counterintuitive actions and doesn't hinge much on the moral character of the population at all. The fact that we, to a country, have all experienced significant challenges in addressing these issues speaks, in part, to the degree in which innate traits and their importance have come to dominate our thinking in the past decades.

The obvious question from here on in is why, if the trait-based structure is causing us such trouble, do so many people tend to persist in it? Here the answer cuts to the core of the problem: fear of agency and the attendant responsibility. To exercise a skill to its full extent is an exercise in agency: in using your will, judgement and effort to make a change to the world in some way. To learn a skill likewise requires agency, responsibility and the assumption of risk: there is, after all, always the chance that a skill will be useless or something that you're bad at. With all of these things, you can fuck up and it's quite easy to, in one way or another, make the world worse. Other people having agency is just as much of a threat: it means that they might choose to do things and act in ways that will change the world in ways inconvenient or hurtful to you, or that they might decide to do things that you don't approve of (or worse, things that undermine your sense of your own superiority). Valuing and appreciating skill, then, is dangerous and a little scary. In trait-land, by contrast, agency isn't really a thing: people do things because of the traits they have, and they will always do those things, regardless of learning or environment. As much as that leads to unpleasant consequences, that can still be easier than allowing that we are where we are because of the choices that we, and more importantly other people, have made. And so we return to social skills. In the skill-based model, both the other person and you can learn and can choose how to act in a social situation. That puts responsibility on both of you to choose well, to help each other learn, and to be aware of the impact of circumstance and environment on how you act. All of that is hard, and often means looking past an initial impression to dig deeper: work that a lot of people don't want to do. Making social skills about inherent traits lets you avoid this: you can just get rid of people who look or sound weird or give off the wrong vibe, or even people who are just of the wrong colour or gender, and nobody needs to take or have any agency through the whole process. And as bad as the consequences are, at least they aren't your fault and didn't require that you did anything hard.

Personally, I think I'd prefer it if we did things differently.