This post examines the virtue of amiability (and closely-related virtues like friendliness, geniality, agreeableness, conviviality, affability, niceness, affection, and warmth). I mean to explore what other people have learned about these virtues, rather than to express my own opinions about them, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations.
I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn and to become better. I hope it will help people who want to know more about these virtues and how to nurture them.
What are these virtues?
These virtues have to do with being pleasant to be around in casual social settings. If you exhibit these virtues, people feel at ease initiating interactions with you, engaging with you, or simply being around you. You signal that you have benign and respectful intent, in a legible way (you are not a grouch, abrasive or obnoxious, or socially awkward in a way that is off-putting or hard to negotiate). You harmonize well with your social environment (you are not contentious or a shit-stirrer). You welcome friendly interactions with others (you are not stand-offish, cold, brusque). You tone down or repress any inclinations to ratchet up social tensions (you are not ill-natured, querulous, snappy, abrasive, hostile, disputatious).
If you go overboard, being insincere or over-the-top in the way you butter up those around you, you might be accused of being a flatterer or being fawning, obsequious, unctuous, oleaginous. The old-fashioned term “man-pleaser” is sometimes deployed in this context. Someone who is so friendly that you’re sure they’re about to pitch you Amway or Krishna Consciousness puts you on edge rather than at ease with their amiability.
Many of the social virtues can assist amiability. These include hospitality, graciousness, connection, goodwill, courtesy, kindness, sympathy, gentleness/tenderness, tolerance, tact, civility, cheer, warmheartedness, concern, and consideration. Friendliness is distinct from friendship, as the latter involves properly maintaining a more durable, less-superficial relationship, while the former concerns how you interact with people in general, including strangers and casual acquaintances. That said, affection and warmth are also important ingredients of more intimate friendships, romantic relationships, and family relationships.
Affection and touch
When I looked around for resources about “affection” in particular, I mostly found resources about affection in the context of romantic (or sometimes parental) relationships—particularly about how to deploy physical affection / touch in a graceful and welcome way.[1]
But I think that’s just a specific case of a more general skill. I’ve had times when someone has placed their hand on my arm and looked me in the eye in a gently encouraging way that was effectively affectionate without being either romantic or parentalish. I can’t put my finger on what qualities made it work where in other contexts it might have been awkward or counterproductive.
Touch is difficult: it can be a good way of expressing affection/warmth, but it can also be misinterpreted as a romantic overture or a predatory gambit; sometimes it is also seen as condescending.
When going along to get along is a bad strategy
At first, amiability looks like a sort of common-sense “things I learned in kindergarten” sort of virtue. But it has a common and challenging element attached to it: An example of a situation in which we struggle to find the Golden Mean of this virtue is when some casual acquaintance tells a joke that depends for its humor on the shared assumption of an offensive racial stereotype. Do we laugh in order to be agreeable and just try to move on, or do we signal our disapproval? When does our obligation to be agreeable and tolerant get eclipsed by our obligation to insist on better standards of behavior or our disgrace at being associated with shameful behavior? “Go along to get along” is a real problem, and it comes from being inattentive to the balancing act this virtue requires.
Other ways niceness can go awry
“The true gentleman is friendly but not familiar; the inferior man is familiar but not friendly.” ―Confucius[2]
Some people prioritize niceness at the expense of other virtues. Niceness can be cloying if it seems forced or insincere (or overwhelming or presumptuous).
If you presume more intimacy than you have earned—by sharing or demanding personal information, or by assuming you have permission to touch someone affectionately for instance—you may be overstepping your bounds in a way that comes across as more threatening than friendly, whatever your intentions.
Charming sociopaths
Geniality can be a thin social virtue. Sociopaths are sometimes very charming, but also very self-serving: buttering you up to see what they can get out of you. (But do sociopaths perhaps get an unfairly bad name: tarred by the brush of the more sadistic among them? After all, when it comes down to it, we love sociopaths.[3])
The virtue of being disagreeable
“In affability there is no hatred of men, but precisely on that account a great deal too much contempt of men.” ―Nietzsche[4]
Is there a virtue to be found in being disagreeable? Maybe there is a case to be made for being a cantankerous grouch instead. Different people shine in different contexts and in different ways.
How to improve at amiability
With most virtues, the key to getting better is practice. You start more-or-less clumsy, then you put in effort at the margin of your current ability, and over time you become more capable. With social virtues, the early, clumsy stage of this process can be embarrassing. You have to put yourself out in front of other people, deliberately doing things beyond your current skill level.
If you find social embarrassment intolerably uncomfortable or frightening, you will struggle with this. You somehow need to be able to say “I’m definitely going to screw up from time to time because I’m pushing myself beyond my current comfort zone, but that’s okay—I’ll just brush that off and move on, because I know that’s what it takes.” Easier said than done. Maybe some preliminary work on the virtue of courage would help.
Different people have different sorts of deficits in amiability, with different roots. Some people want to be agreeable but don’t have a good idea of what vibe they’re putting out (e.g. the awkward). Other people developed disagreeableness as a strategy for keeping people at bay (e.g. the gruff). Other people like drama and find other people more interesting when they’re uncomfortable (e.g. the shit-stirrer). Others are unfriendly because they think they’ve got more important things to do than be pleasant (e.g. the jerk). With such variety (and this is just off the top of my head), there will also be a variety of strategies for becoming more agreeable. It may require a lot of work just to identify what’s causing your deficits in the first place before you start working on them.
The difficulty of getting reliable feedback
With amiability there is an additional challenge: it can be difficult to get good feedback. Let’s say you find yourself at a bus stop with some random stranger, and you think—“aha! I have an opportunity to practice my amiability.” You notice they are wearing an unusually interesting sweater, and decide to compliment them on it as an opening conversational gambit.
Imagine that you do this in a fabulously competent, suave, utterly disarming way, and the stranger replies by grunting, looking down at their shoes, and inching away from you on the bench. Maybe they’re having a bad day, or they aren’t very good at friendliness either, or they’re hard of hearing and are embarrassed to confess they didn’t understand what you said. Any number of things might have happened, but your feedback is: “boy howdy, that sure flopped.”
Or on the other hand, maybe you compliment them on their sweater in an incompetent way that makes you sound like you’re being sarcastic, or are making an inappropriate sexual overture, or something like that. But they overlook that and smile and tell you the story of how they got the sweater and then ask you about your jacket, and you hit it off grandly. Maybe they’re just especially fond of conversation, or they’re charitable about the foibles of the people around them, or maybe they misheard you. You may never know. But your feedback now is: “nailed it!”
It may take a lot of data before reliable patterns show up. If you have friends you trust to be frank with you, you can ask them for feedback on how you’re doing and how you might improve.
Become a brilliant conversationalist by letting them talk
I was lucky enough to have a good friend who was extraordinarily good at this virtue.[5] The way he described it, it was definitely an acquired skill and not something that just came naturally to him. So that (and my own experience at becoming more middlingly competent) makes me more confident in saying that this virtue is learnable and can be improved with practice.
Greg, my friend, had an incredible knack for turning a stranger into a friend in minutes. I tried to study and learn from his techniques, but I think I was only perceptive enough to pick up some of the rudimentary stuff.
One thing I noticed was that he was very skillful at quickly turning the conversation to whatever it was that the other person was most interested in talking about. Just about everybody has some thing or things that they’re passionate about. Sometimes they’re a little reluctant to start talking, though, because they don’t want to get typecast or to come off as a monomaniac. But Greg would manage to steer the conversation (yet without seeming to, maybe “surf” is better than “steer”) until it became about the other person’s favorite thing, and then he would be full of questions. Before long, the other person was loquacious, comfortable, and fully convinced that Greg was a man of excellent taste whom he or she was lucky to have met. Meanwhile Greg was learning all about some new niche subject directly from an expert, while also making a new friend.
I later learned this was also a favorite tactic of Eleanor Roosevelt, though more as a way of becoming more educated and well-rounded than as a method of social lubrication. She wrote:
“I made a game of trying to make people talk about whatever they were interested in and learning as much as I could about their particular subject. After a while I had acquired a certain technique for picking their brains. It was not only great fun but I began to get an insight into many subjects I could not possibly have learned about in any other way.”[6]
I don’t have anywhere near the knack for this that Greg did, but I’ve tried to learn from his technique. Now I tend to spend most of my casual conversations with people asking them questions about things they have already expressed enthusiasm about. I learn a lot that way, and I think I come across much better in conversation than when I used to spend most of my half of the conversation saying things I thought were interesting or important or impressive.
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e.g. Dacher Keltner on Touch (video of lecture) Greater Good Science Center
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Analects of Confucius, ⅩⅢ.ⅹⅹⅲ
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Adam Kotsko “Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television” The New Inquiry 4 April 2012
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Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil Ⅳ.93 (1886)
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David Gross “Keep your lamps trimmed and burning” (video) 27 August 2012
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Eleanor Roosevelt You Learn by Living (1960) p. 9