Social Skills

Social Skills

The purpose of this descriptive essay is to look at social skills from a behavioural science perspective. Social psychology theory maintains that people tend to become friends with others based on similarities, common and shared interests, proximity, reciprocity and intelligence. Indeed, the saying “Tell me who your friend is and I’ll tell you who you are” – is well supported by psychological findings.

Naturally, communication is an important part of social interaction. However, people differ immensely in their abilities to communicate. Further, the world is divided into countless cultures, languages and dialects, which does not always facilitate matters. Nonetheless, some pointers do exist which help people avoid misunderstandings and communicate more efficiently. Further, while it is important to be able to express one’s ideas verbally and in written form, most effective communicators spend a lot of time listening to their interlocutors.

Thus, aside from being polite and attentive during conversations, other social skills include being conscious of social cues. Social cues constitute non-verbal clues as to where the social interaction is headed. Between close friends, family members and other people who know each other well, understanding is facilitated by knowledge of the other person. Conversely, in exchanges between less familiar people, such as coworkers, both parties rely mostly on social cues to know when to start and stop the conversation, among other things. As discussed elsewhere in our essay collection, social cues include but are not limited to posture and body language, verbal and vocabulary content, tone of voice and facial expressions.

Many creatures have certain social skills. Photo by Elena

Moreover, agreeableness is part of social presentation and interaction. indeed, people tend to like when others are nice to them, this holds true especially for politeness. However, assertiveness skills are also a core feature of the social skill set, and being liked. While often one may refrain from saying ‘no’ or disagreeing for fear of being disliked, very often stating one’s boundaries clearly may actually make the other person like and respect one more. Further, individuals with low self-esteem may continuously feel that they ought to do things for others and be overly agreeable to be liked, but assertive individuals are liked and respected, not to mention less frustrated and often much more satisfied with their social connections. Naturally, assertiveness is not the same as aggression.

In other words, while social psychologists have consistently demonstrated that aggressive and hostile individuals tend to be disliked by their peers, there is a difference between being nice and being too nice. Individuals with low self-image may feel the need to compensate for their perceived flaws, by being overly nice, a situation which may then lead them to be taken advantage of. Furthermore, when they realize what has happened, they may rationalize the other person’s behaviour blaming themselves and not the aggressor, and thus further lowering their self-image.

Thus, social skills and the interpersonal skill set comprise complex subjects, a profound discussion of which would be impossible given the scope of the present draft. Therefore, to sum up some of the theoretical constructs and arguments presented above, agreeableness as well as assertiveness, play important roles in social interaction. The present informative paper aims at discussing social skills in relation to psychology.