Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control
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To me it sounds like the dating class hired models to tell people the dating class helped :-)
More seriously though, I imagine two groups of people. The first ("anxious normies") would be helped a lot by this advice, because removing anxiety would unlock their social grace. The second ("non-normies") don't have much social grace to unlock, so this advice would rather hurt them by making their lack of grace more exposed. Or at least it should be supplemented by some other advice how to train grace.
ooh, just noticed this comment.
Re: the first bit, all feedback was given in front of all the men and all the models. There weren't really secrets about what the models thought and their brutality could be spectacular to witness. As could Lynn's. Responses to guys at the end ranged from "you seem kinda like a child to me" to "you're so anxious and i wish you could chill the fuck out" to "you seem really sexually inhibited and i think you should work on that" to "i really enjoyed working with you :)" to "you are the most insecure man I have ever met and need to learn to take any kind of criticism or you will never grow."
Re: the second bit.... hmm. Yeah, I do sometimes wonder about this. Like, the problem with social anxiety is your social calibration is broken, and the problem with non-normies is they ALSO have broken social calibration but ALSO have poor baseline behaviors.
I have no idea how non-normies can train social grace.
Unfortunately I think social grace can only be trained to a small degree, for reasons similar to ASD not being curable. Some people just have a natural social grace, others are much more socially awkward, and removing their social inhibitions too much may make them "cringe" or even "creepy".
For what it's worth, I definitely had a period where my social anxiety had gone down and then I did some dumb stuff that people experienced as cringe and creepy for a while (causing my anxiety to shoot up again for a bit after some of them reacted extremely negatively). But then after a while, it got better as I learned from the feedback.
Children usually don't have very much social grace either but then they get better at it over time, which suggests that it's a trainable skill like any other.
I think it's trainable mainly in the indirect sense: If someone has a lot of social grace, they can pull off things (e.g. a risque joke in front of a woman) that would be perceived as cringe or creepy in people with significantly less social grace. These latter people can become less cringe/creepy by learning not to attempt things that are beyond their social grace capabilities. (Which reduces their extraversion, in contrast to treating anxiety, which boosts extraversion.)
I think already children show significant differences in social grace. I remember a kid in elementary school who got bullied a lot because of his often obnoxious behavior. He had both very low social grace and very low social anxiety. I assume with time he learned to become less outgoing, because that wasn't working in his favor. Outgoing behavior can be scaled down at will, but social grace can't be easily scaled up. Even people who are good at social grace don't explicitly know how to do it. It's a form of nonverbal body/intonation language that seems to be largely innate and unconscious, perhaps controlled by an (phylogenetically) older part of the brain, e.g. the cerebellum rather than the cortex.
Of course that's all anecdotal and speculation, but I would hypothesize that statistically the level of social grace of a person tends to stay largely the same over the course of their life. The main reason is that I think that lack of social grace is strongly related to ASD, which is relatively immutable. It seems people can't change their natural "EQ" (which includes social grace) much beyond learning explicit rules about how to behave according to social norms, similar to how people can't change their natural IQ much beyond acquiring more knowledge.
I would hypothesize that statistically the level of social grace of a person tends to stay largely the same over the course of their life
To be more precise, it's that their social grace relative to their peers would be constant. Assume this is true. Now your hypothesis to explain this would be
I think that lack of social grace is strongly related to ASD, which is relatively immutable
Counter hypothesis: Social grace is learnable. When you do or say something, people around you can signal positively or negatively. Given enough signals, you can figure out what parts of your words/actions elicit positive or negative responses.
Then why do some people plateau in social grace?
- In relatively uncalibrated individuals the training data is more costly to acquire: they're relatively uncalibrated, so more likely to elicit negative response than their peers.
- If you accumulate enough negative signals, then you're out of the tribe.
- Thus they've less opportunities to learn, either because they avoided many, or were ejected from their peer group.
- miscalibration gets relatively worse over time: their peers improve faster.
This hypothesis would explain some ASD people's consistent lack of social grace, even given lots of potential opportunities to learn, over a long time, even if they were equally perceptive of social signals.
What do you think?
@Chipmonk was previously discussing how social insecurity is exactly this - trying to control other people in ways they can't be controlled (e.g. trying to control what they think of you), and how this means that there's a misunderstanding of the boundaries between people. I think "The natural boundaries between people" is the most up-to-date write-up about it.
When I started commenting on Hacker News, I was worried about karma, so I wrote carefully. At some moment I achieved 1000 karma, and also decided that HN consumes too much of my time... that it would actually be better for me in long term to lose all that karma and the account. So I started writing whatever came to my mind. Now my karma is above 2500 (but I had to check as I was writing this comment to find it out).
But this advice is trickier than it seems, because I also see some people write whatever comes to their mind, and get downvoted to oblivion, both on HN and on LW. So maybe the actual rule is more complicated, and it requires a certain degree of competence first, and then stop worrying...
On further introspection, I am actually trying to hold myself to some standards, it's just that those standards are not closely related to other people's immediate feedback. I won't write stupid shit, because that would make me feel ashamed of myself. Other than that, if someone downvotes me (or even blocks me), whatever.
Yeah, I feel very seen in this moment. I spent a long time polishing this blog post and while i think some of that was well-spent, some of it was just neurotically changing words around while being concerned about how it would be received.
I guess it feels harder in writing than in speech because in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.
I had the impression while reading that, at some point during the FAQ you stopped caring and had fun writing, and I thought this illustrated the point of the post pretty nicely.
in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.
Exactly the reason why I post articles so rarely, despite spending a lot of time on internet, even a lot of time writing stuff on internet. A certain short amount of text can be written and sent successfully before the anxiety takes over.
This feels like "directional advice", which is excellent for some people, and terrible for others. Which category they fall into depends on their starting point. If you're socially anxious but basically well-meaning, this advice will help. If you're already self-centered, this advice will make you incredibly obnoxious.
When I was much younger, it took me a long time to figure out dating. But the one thing that clicked for me was realizing that trying to make people like me was pointless. They had probably made their minds up almost immediately, and I had no control over that. But I also realized that there were people who were interested in me. My job was to do two things:
- Recognize signals of interest, and
- Respond encouragingly, and put the ball back in their court. Ideally, I wanted to communicate two things: "Your attention is welcome", and "The next move is totally in your hands."
This isn't quite the classic male gender role in dating. Zvi had an essay the other day about how it was the woman's job to set up the "room", and the man's job to "read the room" and actually move the process forward. But meh, that's not my thing. I wasn't going to take the active role at every single step. I wanted a dance where both people participated. I could learn to read subtle and indirect signals, and I could return them in a very slightly less subtle but still deniable way, and make it a game of back and forth. And yes, this acted as a filter, and it meant I only ever dated women who took steps to get what they wanted. But that's my type.
But a key part of all this was realizing that I neither had nor wanted any control over how the other "player" in the game would react. If someone wasn't interested (and the median person wasn't!), no worries. My job was to meet enough people, and learn to read signals well enough, to find someone who was interested in a "game of mutual attraction." And the nice thing is that when the other person was trying to make things happen, they'd smooth over any minor mistakes on my end. I just needed to avoid panicking and accidentally freezing them out, lol. It turns out that trying to send the message, "I don't want to be too familiar and make it weird" often sends the message "Ugh, you're creeping me out, please back off."
For better or worse, however, a huge portion of the "game of mutual interest" seems to happen in body language and facial expression. And bolder moves often work best when they offer the other person a choice: "Here's an easy way to step forward," and "Here's a graceful way to step back that I'm deliberately leaving open for you." Humor can help!
And of course, this can apply outside of dating. Being confident enough to let a single interaction fall through, and doing it gracefully, helps in the business world, and in many other areas of life. You can't make everyone like you, and many people will never be interested in what you're offering. But it's a big world.
I'm a little confused, does embracing this new found abandonment of the compulsion to manage your appearance to others require or manifest, just like in the First Day Exercise, speaking your mind truthfully rather than manufacturing statements based on your assumption of what people want to hear?
I'm not sure how applicable that is, because I am certain that if I spoke what was on my mind more frequently, that the chief reaction would be bewildered silence, or nonsequiter replies borne out of fundamental misunderstanding of what I meant[1]
If I may write without filter or fear of how other Lesswronger's may perceive me: At any given time I some pretty good candidates for what's on my mine is me an obscure Simpsons gag, or a scene from a Parajanov/Varda/Ilyenko/Fassbinder film. So to speak frankly about what's on my mind IRL is quite simply operationally impossible because not everyone has encyclopedia Simpsons or Film knowledge and may have no reference or handle for what particular gag or film scene I'm thinking about.
So I'm more inclined to default to silence since I have no interest in having a monologue. That silence, however, can be interpreted as rudeness, received as intimidating, or even a sign of arrogance: but if I understand you correctly the courage to remain silent, and not feel the need to speak for fear of any of the above is the lesson you've learned?
Or is the lesson just about accepting and learning not to micromanage impressions and feel responsible for the comfort and feelings of your conversation partners?
- ^
TVTropes calls it "One Dialogue, Two Conversations" imagine something like this:
"The pastry is a bit dry"
"I agree, strange hot weather we've been having"
Except now scale up the verbiage from a misunderstanding of 'dry' to, oh I don't know, a half-remembered reference to Roland Barthes said about Greta Garbo
Ultimately the reason so much of this post is autobiographical is that while I suspect the mechanism of social anxiety that I posit is generally correct, the method by which I am resolving it is probably somewhat specific to me.
I have different challenges than other people, and so different kinds of explicit goals might work for me than you, in terms of threading the needle between "resolves anxiety by giving me explicit internal standards by which I can judge my behavior" versus "enables me to function happily as a social being without an unacceptable probability of unpleasant blowback."
I think the important thing is to have standards of behavior for yourself that are fundamentally objective (ish) and totally under your control. I don't necessarily know what that looks like in your case, though.
1I think it is valid to be concerned about how other people perceive you, so I will try some synthesis here:
It is bad to assume that every "not absolutely safe" behavior (1) will be perceived as bad; and that if that happens, (2) that is a horrible thing.
1) If you avoid obviously bad behavior, some things you do may or may not be perceived as bad. Sometimes the probability is reasonably low. And the "absolutely safe" behavior actually also sometimes rubs people the wrong way. And some people will give you a negative reaction no matter what you do, e.g. because you remind them of someone they hate, or because they already came in a bad mood.
Stop trying to achieve the impossible. If you think that even a small rate of rejection is unacceptable, that's an interesting topic you can discuss with your therapist. (A possible answer could be that you need to meet more people, so that each individual rejection is a smaller fraction of your social environment.)
2) If you avoid obviously bad behavior, the fact that someone dislikes you has little impact both on you and on the other person. The next day they will probably forget that you exist. You need to move on, too.
That said, it is useful to sometimes get feedback on your behavior. You just don't need to do that every day, before speaking every sentence. That is bad timing, and it will interfere with your social interactions. Instead, you can reflect afterward about whether there was something you could have done better (sometimes there wasn't), or once in a while you can ask your trusted friends to give you feedback.
Yeah I was having a really rough time trying to find a good synthesis. I think I arrived at my current setup because my default behaviors are pretty good if and only if I'm not freaking out about how I'm coming across; I think this is broadly typical but definitely not universal.
Agreed that there is an important difference between trying to force a specific micro-scale interaction to go well (no! bad!) vs trying to set up rules in such a way that interactions go well for you in general.
Thanks, that was an interesting post, it seems like an overall plausible theory. In fact more plausible than the recent one by Chipmonk you linked to, as your theory is much wider and somewhat includes the one by Chipmonk (per point two in your list).
I think one common reason for social anxiety is still missing in this list though: Fear of being humiliated. A rejection, or a cringe comment, can feel excessively humiliating to someone with social anxiety, even if they don't believe the other person will feel awkward or will dislike them.
I think that's indeed something exposure therapy can help with. Just thinking something like "this fear of humiliation is clearly exaggerated, let's not worry about it" is like thinking "this fear of spiders is clearly exaggerated, let's not worry about it". It won't help much because the fear by itself isn't really what's exaggerated, it's the consequence of something that is exaggerated. The fear comes from correctly predicting that a spider touching you would freak you out excessively, just as you're correctly predicting that you would feel excessively humiliated if a social faux pas or a rejection were to occur. It's more a phobia than a proper anxiety. I don't think you can reason yourself out of a phobia without some form of "exposure therapy".
Though again, that's only one additional potential cause for social anxiety which doesn't apply to every case.
Yeah. Rejection sucks, social humiliation sucks.
I do agree with you about exposure therapy; I think it's important in the sense that it gets you reps on this stuff, I just don't think it necessarily functions alone without conscious reordering of your goals away from "control others' internal state"
I saw several people at LessOnline concerned explicitly about their social phobia about trying to ensure they were never boring anyone, and I don't think that is solvable without explicitly abandoning "never bore anyone" as a goal (an alternative goal structure might be "ensure I am always giving adequate space in the conversation", which is fine because that is a goal you can easily implement and verify.)
