Phatic communication: how to get laid and influence people.

Phatic communication is a fancy term coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski that means basically the same thing as 'small talk': communicative acts whose functions are primarily social, and not necessarily meant to convey information. It's easy to dismiss small talk as just so much useless blather, but we live in a world run by people, and so mastering the art of bullshitting is just as important as actually having something substantive to talk about!

Silence serves a complementary function to small talk in social settings. It can signal comfort or confidence, particularly in social settings where participants are close friends or intimates. On the other hand, silence induces anxiety in human beings, because it's often associated with danger and uncertainty; an example of this is classic film trope of someone walking in the woods, and all of a sudden, the birds stop singing. Silence and small talk are construed differently among cultures, but in general, small talk serves to lessen social distance, while silence tends to reinforce or increase it. Communication among people of different levels of social status tend to include less small talk, while communication among equals tend to include far more.

Small talk and social anxiety

Small talk is risky for those with social anxieties. It forces you to self-disclose, and that makes you vulnerable to being judged, but in reality, it's far worse to wall yourself up, because you relinquish control of how you're perceived by others. There's this binary trap that a lot of people with delayed social development fall into, which basically pigeonholes people into 'smart' and 'stupid', and falsely equates silence with profundity, but that oversimplifies the idea of intelligence.

In other words, most people are smart, but in very different ways, and just because you got a 340 on the GRE doesn't mean you're necessarily 'smarter' than someone who waits tables for a living, or panhandles, or sells used cars. All three roles take a keen ability to evoke certain emotional responses in people, and that takes practice. And so a large part of why this topic fascinates me is because the late development of my social skills relative to my other intelligences allowed me to consciously guide and reflect on the process of acquiring social skills.

How to get laid and influence people

One of the most important things I learned was that social skills aren't inherent or innate. They are learned skills. Anthropologists have a fancy word for that: enculturation. There exist very few things that are truly universal in human social life. Almost all human cultures consider incest, murder, and theft to be transgressions. Almost all human cultures grieve for the dead and use food as a nucleus for social activity. That's really about it. Ritual exchanges devoid of informational content along the lines of the classic 'how are you / I'm fine (even when you're not)' exist not only in mainstream North American cultures, but also world-wide, and can even can be observed in non-human animals, such as the contact calls of birds or the mutual butt-sniffing of dogs.

What this means is that while blooming late is not without consequence, it also doesn't mean you're doomed to a life of cringing awkwardness. I never went on a date until I was in my early twenties. Now I do all right. I used to freeze when I was expected to talk to strangers. Now I'm cracking jokes at conferences and happily bullshitting around in front of roomfuls of very smart people. I still have my moments, of course, when I feel like an utter social reject, but they're fewer and further between these days. So I empathize with the socially-awkward. I want to help.

Source: http://xkcd.com/222/