What SOCIAL CUES really is

Post Reply New Topic

Picking up on social cues is much more complex than some of the examples I see mentioned on WP over and over and over and over and over again, such as knowing when to nod in sympathy at another's stories or how to do smalltalk or what to answer to the do I look fat in this dress question.

Picking social cues is about instinctively grasping and especially instinctively acting upon that grasp of: how much you can get away with what you want as opposed to having to concede to the other(s) in the group.

Intuitive gauging of the delicate, extremely complex, and totally hidden rules that are governing a specific interaction between two or more people at a specific point in time. Gauging fast enough and accurately enough so as to know what you can and cannot get away with - can only be done through intuition.

One job interviewer is totally different from another. Yes, there are commonalities. But what differentiates an NT from an Aspie is: if you give an Aspie 10 different interviewers, the Aspie will relate to all of them the same. The NT will relate in 10 different ways, and will adapt to each specific interviewer in a matter of seconds, and without wasting a second or getting distracted by having to think about it.

Social intuition is about acting on knowledge that you are not aware you have (aka intuition). It's not something you can choose to tune out, it's not something you can grow, it's not something you can learn, it's not a skill you can use or not use. Intuition is a brain function, NTs have it and Aspies don't. And that's what makes us NTs and Aspies qualitatively different. It's not a question of degrees (aka quantitative), so it can't be developed.

Because we lack social intuition, Aspies try to generalize about how to behave with people. It's all good and extremely useful to learn the rules, but it has no point of comparison whatsoever to the real thing. The real thing is about being able to identify what tune each person is singing, and what tune is being sung by the group as a whole and the sub-tunes of sub-groups within the group. Being able to identify a tune we can sing to go along with the tune that's being sung by those in power, or the majority, or those we want to impress. Knowing how to cackle a few notes ourselves here and there to the whole choir indistinctively is a completely different thing. Let's not delude ourselves. This is one brain function we don't happen to have. Better concentrate on being good in other areas than waste our lives trying to improve what cannot be improved. You can't improve something that doesn't exist. Not with experience, not with skills courses, not with reading or analysis or trial-and-error or practice. It.is.not.there.

I see what you are saying. I do have to say though that I have an aspie friend who is very intuitive. . .he just takes longer to process what he takes in than others. . .sometimes a very long time.

very well defined. :D Kudos Greentea. :D

Fast, automatic, immediate action is intrinsic to intuition. Intuition is about the immediate action that results from unconscious knowledge. Without the immediate action, it's a different brain function, not intuition. A different brain function that comes to solve other kinds of challenges, not those challenges that require immediate action.

What we Aspies lack is the immediate adaptive reaction to a specific social milieu we are thrown into.

Example: We have a new boss. All my colleagues know how far they can go with the new boss and when to stop. From day one. I have no clue after 4 months. It's a very fine line. You can't determine it with enough precision except through intuition.

Oh I didn't realize that. I thought intuition just ment that you came to know something almost in a 6th sense kind of a way rather than by reasoning it out. . .so what do you call it if someone can do this but it takes longer?

People have frequently called me intuitive (even too intuitive) but sometimes I have that processing lag. . .mine just isn't near as long as my friend's. For me it usually kicks in once I am out of the social situation that I was getting the cues from.

I have managed to improve my social skills with courses and reading. Nobody knows how to instinctively drive a car, but that doesn't mean that you can't learn it.

I know I'll never be a social expert--but at least I'll eventually gain adequate social skills.

The OP is in fact using a narrow definition of intuition, one that means using intuition in typical social contexts and then applying what one knows immediately. That is not the definition of 'intuition', any more than stopping at a red light in traffic is the definition of 'color perception'.

I hate to throw a dictionary at anyone, but intuition means (loosely paraphrased from definitions I'm reading) knowing something, or thinking you know something, instinctively without the use of conscious, logical thought processes. A gut feeling. A person can act on that knowledge in any way they please, including inaction, and it's still intuition.

That's the way most people use the word anyway, not just the dictionary. If it's suddenly being used differently on autistic people, then I'll have to assume it's something like 'imagination', where autistic people were said to lack it, then autistic people were proven to have it, and the experts, instead of admitting that they were wrong, changed the meaning of the word 'imagination' into something else entirely and claimed autistic people lacked that. The equivalent of saying "That object over there is one of the cool colors," when the cool colors are normally known to be green, blue, and purple. And then discovering that the light was too dim to tell the color, and that the color was red, not green. Instead of correcting oneself, the person then says, "Well I meant 'cool' as in, when you burn something, the cooler kinds of flame are the more reddish ones, of course." That sort of thing is never very convincing to me, and if any of the 'experts' are starting to pull that crap with the word 'intuition' I'll be highly irritated with them for refusing to admit when they're wrong.

Anyway, on to actual intuition (not narrowly-defined-as-possible intuition) in autistic people.

I'm autistic, and I have what my best friend calls a highly-developed gut. According to some of the autism research, this is due to many autistic people having highly-developed perceptual reasoning skills (pattern-matching and the like) that are entirely separable, when necessary, from what's normally called 'higher order' thinking, and possible to be used in tasks that are normally thought to be only possible using conscious abstraction. In addition to explaining many previously puzzling aspects of garden-variety autistic thinking, this also explains extremes of autistic talent, such as savant skills (which, while not universal in autistic people, are way more common in autistic people than in non-autistic people).

At any rate, I find it easier to figure things out using what most people would call intuition, rather than to figure them out through what most people would call ordinary thinking, although I can do both (I just have more trouble sustaining 'ordinary thinking').

And I know this is true of a pretty large number of autistic people. I'm far from unusual in that regard. It's certainly true of all savants within their area of savant skill, and of many non-savant autistic people as well.

And promoting a version of intuition that requires a person's body to be able to respond to it, in addition to being like saying that something is only logic once someone acts on it, is also completely unfair to non-autistic people who have completely typical forms of social intuition but who are paralyzed or otherwise unable to move their bodies in typical ways to respond instantaneously.

Intuition isn't just social intuition, social intuition isn't just typical social intuition, and social intuition also isn't somehow only valid if accompanied by instantaneous typical responses.

Hi All;

GreenTea, I would have to differ with you on your basis. My theory has more to do with the skill of multi-tasking. I contend that no one multi-tasks well. If you doubt this, ask the smartest NT you know to solve a calculus problem whilst simutaniously describing an emotional problem they have delt with. Likely, they will do poorly at both tasks. As I see it, NT's "multi-task" perpetually; Poorly. The "gifts" tha many of us aspies have, I believe, is related to the fact that we are only doing one thing at a time, and very well at that. The problem is that while we are in our "own little world" doing what we do so well, the rest of the world is moving on.

Another point; I fit the "Mr. Spock" sterotype quite well. I largely lack the "value based" defence mechanism that NT's posess.
I don't go into the world with an emotional "international friend or foe" constantly scanning for friends or enemys. Consequently, I usualy have no clue who is my friend versus who is my enemy. I also have a very bad habit of starting a conversation with an emotional gut punch. While I may have stated a point of absolute truth, which I will go on to prove, it really doesn't matter because they have sirens going off in their heads saying "Bad Person, Bad Person. Danger Will Rodgers!! !!".

Regards,

Greentea,I can relate to what your saying up
to a point,but I think it's important not to
undervalue the possible benefits of learning
about social cues on step by step experience.
I also think we tend to endow non-autistics
with mystical powers of 'intuition' that they
don't necessarily possess.
One thing that affects our reactions to others
and vice-versa is whether we approach situations with a positive or negative frame
of mind.This is something that NTs are good
at detecting.I've often surprised myself at how
I can somehow emulate them and instinctively tune in to the occasional social cue simply by being in the right frame of mind at the right time.

I thought social cues was reading non verbal cues and body language.

I'm not sure how I did in interviews. I just answer the interviewers questions and that's it. I have only had about three my whole life.

You're very right, Whisperer. I remember a case of an accountant that was sent for extensive testing (8 hours of very expensive testing at a special institute for testing job candidates) before being hired for a firm as the financial officer. He passed the tests with flying colors, and was hired, and then stole from the company. Which makes me wonder what were the tests that he did pass about.

In my country, where computer geeks are extremely sought after by the hitech industry, the job ads on the newspaper almost all read like this nowadays: "Excellent conditions and no testing institute!" Hitech firms had to include this comment because they realized they were missing out on computer geeks and geniuses; they didn't apply for jobs because they knew they wouldn't pass the institute testing. Why? Because what those institutes test first and foremost is social intuition.

Whisperer wrote: "Today it came to me how work interviews seem more inherently designed to weed out non-neurotypicals than any other kind of person.
It's aspie-hell. . . and no wonder I could barely ever get through one."

Whisperer, you are so right!

That is why I too can never succed in job interviews. After I screw up in one, I just analyse what I did wrong & try not to do the same thing next time - it's all I can do.

And how am I supposed to "adapt" to an interviewer when I have never met them before & have no idea what kind of person they are or what their values, likes & dislikes are?

Greentea, I think the reason we don't discuss these things so much is because many of us are completely unaware that this is even an issue.

Certainly for me, you are talking about a concept I can't even begin to comprehend. (Which proves that I must be an aspie....!)

Before I found this board, I would not have believed that anyone could actually care about trivia like this!

The questions I most need to ask are:

What do you mean by "need" to concede to others in the group? Who needs this & why do they need it?

Why do groups of NT's decide not to let others get away with certain things in a social situation? How do they make a collective decision like this without even discussing it with each other?

Why does the "singing" even happen in the first place?

Why is it so important to NT's that others conform to their rules?

Any NT reading my post will probably think "This is a spoof, she can't be serious!" But I am being serious - I really don't "get" why any of this c**p matters so much.

("Say what you mean & mean what you say" is the kind of rule that makes much more sense to me.)

The problem is, because it's "intuitive", no-one seems to know how to answer these questions, which is really frustrating!

So if any NT's out there could give us genuine answers, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd be interested.

(It may help to remember that there are many things that aspies know intuitively which NT's do not, such as beng able to see patterns in things without being shown, even as very small children. This manifests differently in different aspies; in my case I was able to "figure out" how to read just from knowing the alphabet and looking at the words when books were read to me. No-one taught me to read, it was just obvious that C-A-T = "cat".)

1. NTs will tell you there's nothing of the sort, because they're not aware of the game. They respond to it unconsciously and never need to make these tools conscious, so they can't help us. It's like a blind person asking someone who sees to describe the color green.

2. Some Aspies will tell you there's nothing of the sort, because they either haven't discovered it yet, or they have but are in denial (too grim a prospect to accept).

3. Other Aspies will shut up, because they're a minority among 1 and 2. Some may acknoweledge it in private messaging.

4. And one or two Aspies will be brave and acknowledge publicly that there is such a thing as social intuition and that we Aspies don't have it and never will.

GreenTea, I agree with what you're saying.. Aspies can learn to a certain extent how to avoid some major social mistakes... but the ability to intuitively "know" what NT's do naturally, will never happen for us.. We can get better at learning not to make big mistakes, but will really never be able to be as good socially as NTs.. I agree. Unless there is some way to develop that area of the brain that instinctively knows how to communicate NT-style -- then there is NO way we will ever be able to completely do that.. we can cover for it, adapt to try and fit in, but will never be "normal"..

I've been saying lately (as a joke to try and cover up for some of my mistakes) that whatever "gene" there is for social graces, I didn't get that one.. and that I got one for being musically gifted instead : ) Hopefully, people can understand that not everyone is alike and to embrace our differences.