For those wondering: The Scientology staring routines summarised, from David Touretzky's site. Anyone who's read the first section above really needs to closely read this page. (The whole section is quality, and includes demo videos by ex-Scientologists.)
Do it too much and you end up with the famous Scientology Stare, the thousand-yard "fixed, dedicated glare" that anyone who's dealt much with Scientologists will be familiar with. (This guy, from this demo, was doing his stare up to 12 inches from other people's faces.)
Scientology is based on a bunch of low-level hacks on human perceptual routines and cognitive biases. (The staring one works on others by intimidation, as you look confident in an odd therefore unpredictable manner; the routine itself trains you to uncritically accept what's in the later, sillier material.) Hubbard did rather well for someone with no theory and only an aim (money and fame) in mind. I would, however, caution that there are few arts of mind-hacking that are darker.
I strongly advise any LessWrong reader to stay the hell away from this stuff unless they have a fascination with dissecting the mechanisms of how people abuse other people [1]. Luke...
Scientology is based on a bunch of low-level hacks on human perceptual routines and cognitive biases. (The staring one works on others by intimidation, as you look confident in an odd therefore unpredictable manner; the routine itself trains you to uncritically accept what's in the later, sillier material.) Hubbard did rather well for someone with no theory and only an aim (money and fame) in mind. I would, however, caution that there are few arts of mind-hacking that are darker.
The other major hack going on in all of those routines is people paying attention to you. Being paid attention to is an extremely powerful behavior modifier, and it's a major recruitment tool used by cults of all kinds.
(Not only is staring paying attention, but in the other exercises, the instructor is clearly paying attention to the slightest detail of everything you say or do. This type of attention from parents and teachers tends to stimulate a desire to please the person giving the attention.)
PJ has nailed it here. The hacks are really simple and really evil. If they teach you anything that can be called a "communication skill" at all, it's only by happenstance: the real goal is obedience training and swallowing ever-increasing impossibilities.
"The other major hack going on in all of those routines is people paying attention to you. Being paid attention to is an extremely powerful behavior modifier, and it's a major recruitment tool used by cults of all kinds."
I remember when I was 18 and on the road alone on a spiritual quest and I got heavily recruited by a cult. The primary techniques seemed to be giving me such attention and affirmation for every word that came out of my mouth. My reaction was: Well, this is awkward. These people are being very nice but they're not interesting. Given their techniques I had difficulty politely disentangling myself from their presence. After about 12 hours I heard Reverend Moon mentioned, at which point I said "Oh, you're Moonies!". A few hours later I politely bid them goodbye and walked away. They followed me around for a while to no avail.
I wasn't in danger. Their perspective seemed narrow and boring to me.
These are exercises that I happened to learn in a Scientology class. They are not magic rituals that will turn people into Scientologists.
But they were finely tuned over thirty years to do precisely that second thing. The TRs are the number one way Scientology gets its hooks into people's brains and keeps them there! That's why they always try to sell people a Communications Course!
You are not explicitly recommending LW readers go skinny-dipping in a sewer - but you are functionally recommending it by talking about what a marvellously successful experience it was for you. Personal recommendation (including implicit personal recommendation) is the thing that most effectively convinces people to try something.
You went dancing in live fire and dodged a bullet, and that's excellent. Others may not be so lucky, particularly including those who are sure they could never be fooled (since such certainly has no observed correlation with a detailed working awareness of human cognitive biases).
If you can write an article that makes your point (which is a great one) without the first third of it being a story of your great personal successes with Scientology, I would urge you to do so.
You went dancing in live fire and dodged a bullet, and that's excellent. Others may not be so lucky, particularly including those who are sure they could never be fooled
Good point ... now that I think about it, I should probably stop speaking so proudly of how I tried taking up smoking to see if it could hook me and yet it didn't ...
(splutter) That's probably more hazardous than Scientology, yes.
An important thing for the strong to realise when talking about hazards is that other people may not be as strong.
For a proper comparison, you wouldn't just consider addictiveness, but also the harm resulting from becoming addicted. It's not obvious to me which does more expected lifetime damage to you.
Cigarettes (chain smoker): Spend a lot of your money, become uglier and smellier, get excluded from lots of places, lose health while alive and die earlier, lose some connection to family and friends
Scientology: Spend a lot of your money (probably more than a chain smoker on cigarettes), eviscerate your thinking ability, lose most connection to family and friends outside of Scientology.
Is the health hit worse than the mind hit? I really don't know.
I think your disclaimer looks too much like an implicit challenge: "I dabbled with Scientology classes but didn't get hooked because I'm that rational/self-disciplined/awesome; but you shouldn't try it because you're probably not as awesome, and you might get reeled in."
The real history of the disclaimer, though, is more like, "I dabbled and didn't get hooked because I'm awesome, and I didn't warn you about it at first because I think you're awesome, but David Gerard thinks otherwise and he twisted my arm."
For my part, I appreciated having my awesomeness recognized, however briefly. It's not every day that other people notice that about me. :)
I am in fact just a big meanie about this stuff. "Dad just won't let me get into the really good mind controlling, he's so oppressive. Where are my Sea Org teenage minions? This is sooo bogus."
I'm not convinced "p.s.: don't do this thing that worked out really well for me and I shall now describe in thrilled detail" entirely makes it no longer functionally a personal recommendation, but it's possibly better than nothing. Thank you.
Yes but LessWrong is a lot like this - witness all the discussions in thrilled detail of drugs that put your brain into a more effective/enjoyable state. It's assumed that the readership is intelligent/responsible enough to handle this sort of thing.
The desire to succeed in unorthodox ways ("cheat" at life) is strong in many members of this community - Luke's Scientology story fits that pattern very well. It certainly makes me want to try a com course and I've read about Scientology in endless detail - including some of your work.
Sewer-diving could be fun, and instructive! But a note or few about adequate preparation first strikes me as a really good idea. Particularly when the story turns out to be "and then I swallowed this sample of engineered resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis, and I felt great." Hubris is one of the dangers of a little knowledge.
And there's also the thing that while the people who hang around at LW probably have more ammo than usual against the overt bullshit of cults, they also might have some traits that make them more susceptible to cult recruitment. Namely, sparse social networks, which makes you vulnerable to a bunch of techniques that create the feeling of belonging and acceptance of the new community, and tolerance of practices and ideas outside the social mainstream, which gets cult belief systems that don't immediately trigger bullshit warnings inside your head.
The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan that did the subway sarin gas thing reportedly recruited lots of science and engineering students. An engineering mindset will also keep you working from the internalized bullshit against social proof, since science and engineering is a lot about about how weird stuff extrapolated beyond conventional norms works and gives results.
tl;dr: You're not as smart as you think, probably have a mild mood disorder from lack of satisfactory social interaction, and have no idea how you'll subconsciously react to direct cult brainwashing techniques. Don't mess with cults.
Parasite species that have been around a long time have mostly evolved not to kill their host very fast. With new species, all bets are off.
The Mormons are a good comparison. They were dangerous lunatics in the mid-1800s - and Brigham Young was a murderous nutter on a par with David Miscavige. These days, they're slightly weirdy but very nice (if very, very conservative) people; good neighbours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Lisa_McPherson - and she was hardly the first.
I would caution against using "I don't recall" to mean "I haven't researched even slightly".
I think David's point is that when you say "I don't recall X", it matters very much whether you would recall an X to begin with, i.e., whether P("I recall X" | X has happened) is significantly larger than P("I don't recall X" | X has happened). So when you offer up "I don't recall X", people assume you're doing it because the former is larger than the latter.
But if that's not the case, then you are, in effect, using "I don't recall" to mean "I haven't researched", and this is why David was accusing you of blurring the distinction.
I can take a shot at it, having experienced something similar.
The general situation usually follows the pattern of "There is a group with easily-noticeable standards A, B, and C and less-easily-noticeable standards X, Y, and Z. I conform to A, B, and C (though probably for different reasons than they do), but not to (some subset of) X , Y, and Z, but since X and Y and Z don't come up very often, 1) they haven't figured out that I don't fit them, and 2) I didn't realize that those standards were significant until after I'd been accepted as a member of the group (which is where the 'sense of belonging' comes in). At no point did I actually mislead the group with regards to X, Y, or Z, but it's very likely that if they find out that I don't conform to them, they will assume that I did and there will be large amounts of drama."
This usually leads to an inclination to hide facts relating to X, Y, and Z, which feels from the inside like being alienated and uncomfortable.
ETA: This isn't necessarily something that a person would have to be consciously aware of in order for it to happen, and it can also be based on a person's assumptions about X/Y/Z-like standards if a given group doesn't make them explicit.
I agree with the description. Why? Because the joy people describe at going to the meetups seems out of proportion to what goes on in the meetups - unless, as the old saying goes, hunger is the best spice.
He might not. But things will be in his favor if you go in thinking knowing physics and science will make you impervious to the dark arts, without knowing a lot about psychology, cult and influence techniques and the messier stuff inside your own head.
(I'm not sure if you want to say something extra here by quoting a thing that was described as the "second most dangerous dark side meme" in the linked comment.)
I think you "hear" the comment in this tone because that's how you would mean it if you wrote it. But to me, the tone seems reasonable, because when I place myself in lukeprog's position I don't imagine myself feeling any kind of aggression.
I didn't know when I wrote that that Luke had interviewed Russell Miller and had read extensively on Scientology. So I think he would likely have more immunity than most :-) I think his dangerous error is in casually assuming that others are as immune as he is. Perhaps they are, but I wouldn't risk betting that way myself.
I wrote that comment before I saw it. However, that update ("But please, don't take Scientology classes. They are highly Dark Arts. You can learn things on your own without playing with cult fire") is inaccurate. It seems to be saying that Scientology's classes teach those who take them to be manipulative (that is, to use the dark arts), but that is not what the problem is. The real problem is the opposite: they manipulate those who take them. And it doesn't stop at "manipulate", it's an escalating spiral that in some cases goes all the way up to "abduct and traffick".
And, um, I can't help but notice a disturbing connection - the document Gerard linked to says trainers should look for peoples' buttons, focusing on sexual perversion for men, and you were assigned the exercise of staring at a 12-year old girl for 20 minutes. It's eminently plausible that the instructor meant for that to happen and to be creepy. What was she even doing there, how were the pairings assigned, and did the instructor have the option of arranging the pairings in a non-creepy way?
I was at one point a 14 year old girl taking a Scientology Communications course, brought there by my father to train me in his religion. While I certainly can't speak for all of the children in all Scientology classes, most of the other children there that I hung out with were also brought there by their parents to be trained in Scientology.
It seems plausible to me that if there happened to be a 12 year old girl in lukeprog's class, they would have paired them together for that part of the class specifically because it would create an uncomfortable, "creepy" situation. Developing the ability to react unflinchingly to that sort of situation is pretty much the point of the exercise. (As an example, they paired me with a grandmotherly older woman for a different exercise: bullbaiting. She was certainly not the sort of person who I was comfortable trying to provoke a reaction from or had an easy time remaining stoic to.)
But it seems unlikely to me that the people at the Org I went to, at least, would have gone to the extent of enlisting their daughters in the class specifically to make one man feel uncomfortable, as you seem to be proposing.
I really liked your report of the scientology class. The conclusions, not so much. Many LW posts (including some of mine, too ashamed to link here) follow this pattern of giving a wonderful convincing anecdote and then a big flimsy over-generalization on top. Perhaps we could institute a norm that posting anecdotes without making conclusions from them is okay. I took some boxing lessons, still cannot fight but no longer fear physical confrontations, and that's all. I learned to draw using a book by Betty Edwards, it was easy and fun, and that's all.
Of course if you estimate the harmful effect of one such article on one individual, it won't amount to very much! But the proliferation of such articles can turn LW into yet another vague self-help site, in fact from the list of posts it looks like it's already been happening for awhile, and I don't want that to happen.
There's nothing wrong with the conclusion, except we don't know if it's right :-) Unlike many of your other posts, this one isn't based on published research. It's more like garden variety self-help, or as Paul Buchheit put it, "Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice". All self-help authors can claim their advice is good because it works for them and some self-selected others.
Yeah, that's about right. I usually just downvote such "life advice" posts, but now some counter in my mind reached a critical value and I decided to speak out.
I have two major comments. First, I took the Scientology Communications class 35 years ago in Boston, and it was basically the same as what has just been described. That's impressive, in a creepy kind of way.
Second, my strongest take-away from the class I took was in response to something NOT mentioned above, so this aspect may have changed. We were given a small book, something like "The History of Scientology". (This is not the huge "Dianetics" book.) We were told to read it on our own, until we understood it, and would move on to the later activities in the class only after attesting that we had done so. The book was loaded with very vague terms, imprecise at best, contrary to familiar usage at worst, but we were not allowed to discuss their meaning with anyone else, or ask instructors for insight. We had to construct a self-consistent interpretation in isolation, and comparing our own with anyone else's was effectively forbidden in perpetuity. So each student auto-brainwashed. I was impressed by the power of this technique.
Ask a Korean!: When is it OK to Make Eye Contact?
Never, never, NEVER look into the eyes of someone who is in a superior position than you are. This includes everyone who is older than you, even by one year, family or not. This also includes people who are higher than you in a workplace or social hierarchy, regardless of age. (For example, your boss, a judge, etc.) In practical terms, this means that you are pretty safe with not looking into anyone's eyes when you are in Korea.
Also, in places with a lot of ne'er do well young men roaming around and where the enforcement of public order leaves something to be desired, making eye contact with strangers in public can be seen as a challenge to a fist-fight (or worse).
Once you've mastered that, ask them to pretend like they are a stranger so you can approach them and open a conversation 20 times in a row.
A friend actually did this exercise with me when I was about grade 9. At the time I was not so much shy as overwhelmed by small talk; I couldn't process it in real time, so if someone said "what's up?" to me I would freeze and eventually blurt out some rude-sounding conversation-killer. We were on some kind of volunteer field trip, I think, and we spent an hour in the hotel room with her 'starting conversations' with me and me responding. ...Wow, I had actually forgotten I had that much trouble with social skills.
Answering questions like this 100 times in a row will reveal how often most of us speak softly, fail to enunciate, and use filler words like "um."
Some of us wish we could learn to speak more quietly! I don't know if it's because of my family dynamics or the crowd I hung out with in high school, but when I'm excited I speak very loudly and people find it disruptive.
I have always tried to "Build Small Skills in the Right Order", but I think it has been detrimental or even crippling to my learning process in some cases.
I'm pretty good at math, but I haven't studied advanced math and would like to begin a program of self-study. I have started a few times, usually reading the first couple of chapters of a high-level calculus book (Apostol or Spivak), or something at a similar level.
I already know calculus well, having used it as a physics major in college and taught it as a private tutor for high school students, but I am not completely familiar with all the subtleties, such as why Taylor series converge and under what conditions. Reviewing calculus before diving into an advanced book on real analysis seems like a good idea because I know I can understand the calculus book, and reading it will prepare me to study more challenging material.
Nonetheless, what usually happens is that I get impatient at the slow progress, bored with the material, and want to jump straight to the more difficult book. If I do, I feel like I am "doing it wrong" by ignoring the small skills, but if I don't, I wind up abandoning the program of st...
Yes, a thousand times yes.
Note, however, that society is not generally set up to encourage learning this way. In particular, the right order may not be the one they teach in school.
See my discussion-section post Inverse Speed for a case where I had to invoke my understanding of "university-level" mathematics in order to master a "middle-school-level" problem.
How could we apply this to Akrasia? That is, what small skills can you learn to help you beat procrastination, instead of just setting a big goal like, "Finish every assignment at least two days before it's due."? Here are a couple ideas:
1) Pick single, relatively easy things to stop procrastinating on. For example, errands like doing laundry or getting groceries.
2) Starting every assignment right after you're assigned it. It could just be a little bit, one problem or simply an outline, that would help you break the resistance to starting.
I feel ...
I've heard of that specific Scientology training routine - having two people look at each other's eyes for an extended period of time - before. Apparently, doing that with a person of the opposite gender is remarkably effective at producing feelings of romantic love, and Scientology critic Keith Henson describes it and other "auditing" practices as emotional manipulation aking to brainwashing...
The staring one works on others by intimidation, as you look confident in an odd therefore unpredictable manner (a scary and possibly dangerous freak); the routine itself trains you to uncritically accept what's in the later, sillier material. It's obedience training. Many critics, being terribly negative and close-minded and observing how Scientology tends to work out for people, consider the latter the main purpose of the TRs. Luke was pretty much dancing around in live fire here and dodged a bullet.
Nice post, yes, but... something's missing. In summary, I think the question here is, "How should you go about learning a big skill?" The answer this post gives seems to be "find a bunch of small skills that are contained within the big skill, and learn each one; then your small skills will gradually build up to the big skill."
But that method, without a bit of clarification, just won't do. How do you know which small skills are necessary for the big skill? Suppose you want to learn how to drive (and let's assume you're in a country that...
I took some Scientology classes in Hollywood so I could get into their Toastmasters club, which is the best Toastmasters club in L.A. county.
That's interesting, what sets them apart?
This is the basis for the Montessori method of education.
After 2 years of failed swimming lessons by "professionals" I taught my daughter to swim in a few weeks using this technique (learn one step at a time).
BTW one benefit of Montessori education, for the early childhood years 3-5yo, is that the children develop amazing powers of concentration for some reason. My daughter is just amazing in this regard.
YDS class 5 is actually where rock climbing starts -- at any rock climbing gym, for instance, all routes will be class 5 (although many of them will be described as boulders instead). You want to say something like 5.10, which is something that basically nobody starts off able to do, but most people ought to be able to do if they work their way up.
I wonder if the same effect is had staring into someone's eyes over webcam.. The only person that I can really see trying this with is my wife and I have no problem looking into her eyes. I feel like we'd be skewed because we're so familiar with each other...
The main point in this article seems to be "if you learn small things in the right order, the wins you experience will help motivate you".
I think that there's another incredibly important point to add: things have dependencies. To learn B, you must first learn A. Learning things in the right order = traversing the dependency graph efficiently, and I think that this is extremely important.
I took some Scientology classes in Hollywood so I could get into their Toastmasters club, which is the best Toastmasters club in L.A. county.1 My first Scientology class, 'Success Through Communication', taught skills that were mostly non-specific to Scientology. At first, the class exercises seemed to teach skills too basic to be worth practicing. Later, I came to respect the class as surprisingly useful. (But please, don't take Scientology classes. They are highly Dark Arts, and extremely manipulative.)
For the first exercise, I had to sit upright, still, and silent with my eyes closed for about an hour. I was to remain alert and aware but utterly calm. When my head drooped or my hand twitched, I was forced to start over. It took me five hours of silent sitting to complete the exercise successfully. At first I thought the exercise was stupid, but later I found I was now more in control of my awareness and attention, and less disturbed by things in the environment.
For the second exercise, I had to stare directly into someone's eyes without looking away - even for a split second - for 20 minutes in a row. If you've never tried this, you should. It's very difficult. Unfortunately, they first paired me with a 12-year-old girl. I was sure I would freak her out if I stared into her eyes for 20 minutes (it's an intense experience), so I made faces when the instructors weren't looking and waited for them to pair me with an adult. After half a dozen failures, I finally managed to maintain eye contact for 20 minutes in a row, without a single glance away or a long blink.
Again, this seemed absurd at the time, but later I discovered that I no longer had any trouble maintaining eye contact with people. This skill is a small one, but it is highly valuable in almost every social endeavor.
Later exercises seemed childish. An instructor would ask me simple questions from a book like, "What's that over there?" and I would have to answer correctly: "That's a table." I had to do this for hundreds of questions. But I couldn't just say "That's a table" any old way. I had to say it without a stutter, I had to enunciate, and I had to speak loudly. Answering questions like this 100 times in a row will reveal how often most of us speak softly, fail to enunciate, and use filler words like "um." Every time I did one of those things, I had to start over.
In another exercise, the instructor would do everything she could to make me laugh, and I had to sit still and not crack a hint of a smile for 10 minutes in a row. This simple skill took many rounds to master. It is a small skill, but repeating a simple exercise like this will eventually bring almost anyone to mastery of this small skill. At the end of the exercise I had noticeably improved a small part of my self-control mechanism.
This class - a religious class I took as an atheist in order to achieve an unrelated goal - turned out to be one of the most important classes I have ever taken in my life. It taught me an important meta-skill I have used to great effect ever since.
This is the meta-skill of building small skills in the right order. It is now one of the key tools in my toolkit for instrumental rationality.
Previously, I explained the utility of success spirals2:
When you achieve one challenging goal after another, your obviously gain confidence in your ability to succeed. So: give yourself a series of meaningful, challenging but achievable goals, and then achieve them! Set yourself up for success by doing things you know you can succeed at, again and again, to keep your confidence high.
Building small skills in the right order is an excellent way to create and maintain success spirals.
Trying to master a large skill set like salesmanship is a daunting task that will likely involve many demotivating failures before you ever taste success. The same goes for public speaking, writing research papers, and lots of other large skill sets involving a complex interaction of many small skills.
Anna Salamon uses math to explain this concept. You could tackle calculus immediately after Algebra I, and you might eventually pick it up after many frustrating failures if you read the calculus textbook enough times, but why would you do this? It's much easier and more satisfying to learn more algebra piece by piece until the jump to calculus is not so great. That way, you can experience the pleasure and confidence-boost of mastering new concepts all along the way to calculus.
A key component of motivation is time delay. The greater the distance between you and the reward, the less motivated you are to work toward the reward. If you don't experience much reward until you've mastered the entire skill set of salesmanship or public speaking, maintaining motivation will be quite a challenge. But if you experience the reward of mastering small skills all along the way to becoming an effective salesman or public speaker, you have some hope of maintaining motivation throughout the journey.
How might one practice this meta-skill of building small skills in the right order?
Many skill sets, of course, are taught this way by default. Nobody teaches people to play piano by starting with Rachmaninov. Nobody teaches math by starting with calculus. Nobody teaches rock climbing by first free-climbing a YDS Class 5.10 route. But in other areas, this rather obvious lesson is not always applied.
For example, let's say you want to improve your social skills. Don't start by approaching an intimidating businessman and giving him your elevator pitch. You will probably fail, and be demotivated. Instead, start by asking a friend if you can practice staring into his or her eyes for 20 minutes in a row. Offer to buy them lunch, or something. After you've mastered that, ask them to do whatever they can to make you laugh while you try to suppress the urge to smile for 10 minutes in a row. (They will probably do this one without a bribe.) Once you've mastered that, ask them to pretend like they are a stranger so you can approach them and open a conversation 20 times in a row. Have them correct you every time you stutter or speak too softly or without a smile, and start over. Next, do the same exercise with your friend in public. Next, walk up to 10 actual strangers and ask for the time of day, then say "Thanks" and walk away. And so on. Build one skill at a time, and pay attention to the satisfaction of mastery each time you master a new small skill. After mastering many such exercises, you will find that you have mastered an entire new skill set that you previously lacked. And you did it with one small, mostly non-scary step at a time.3
Or suppose you want to learn how to write research papers. Don't start by setting a goal of having a well-written research paper one month from today. Instead, start by learning how to use Google effectively. Talk to a local librarian about how to use your library's resources effectively. Learn how to quickly understand the key terms and concepts in a given field (hint: read textbooks), so you know what to look for in Google Scholar. Learn how to bring yourself up to speed very quickly in a given field (hint: find a recent scholarly anthology of review articles from a major academic press, like this or this or this). Learn how to skim paper titles and abstracts. Learn how to get academic papers for free. Learn how to skim full papers for explanations and references relevant to the particular questions you are looking to answer. Learn how to find the home pages for leading academics in the field to see which papers they've written most recently. Learn the same kinds of small skills - one at a time - relevant to turning all that work into a great research paper. After learning, practicing, and mastering each of these small skills, you will after some time find yourself with some mastery in the entire skill set relevant to writing great research papers.
If you read a self-help book and its recommendations appear well-vetted but you don't experience much improvement, ask yourself: Which smaller, intermediate skills might I need to master before I can succeed in doing what the self-help book recommends? Practice and master those smaller skills first, then go back to the self-help book and try again. You may discover there are small skills that remain to be mastered before you're ready to tackle what the self-help book recommends, in which case you should do another round of granular self-improvement by mastering small skills that are prerequisites for the skills needed to achieve your larger goals. Fill your procedural knowledge gaps.
Much failure and frustration and demotivation results from not building small skills in the right order. This is unnecessary. Master small skills, one at a time, and don't be embarrassed about it. Just try it.
And if you need a partner for eye contact training, just ask. I'll be glad to help kick off your success spiral.
Notes
1 It was a wise choice, by the way. I learned to do public speaking very quickly.
2 In business academia, success spirals are known as "efficacy-performance spirals" or "efficacy-performance deviation amplifying loops." See: Lindsley, Brass, & Thomas (1995). Efficacy-performance spirals: A multilevel perspective. Academy of Management Review, 20(3): 645-678.
3 This book may also help. It's intended for children and those with various degrees of autism, but if you need to develop your social skills one small skill at a time and you can get over your own ego, it might be useful.
