Observational learning and the importance of high quality examples

Yesterday I was in a two hour personal development workshop. Topic was about setting goals and making clear decisions to reach them. The person who gave the workshop that three years ago he was rather shy and had trouble standing in front of people. 3 years later after doing toastmasters and training in a specific coaching paradigm he's confident on stage.

He had his notes and performed the workshop from them. He talked about a few decisions such as making a decision to drink coffee or the decision to close the window of the room. 5 minutes later a person in the audience asks him to close the window and he just closes the window. He doesn't do anything with it because responding to it isn't plannable. He could used the situation to reiterate a point but he didn't. There were also other opportuniteis where he could have interact much better with what the audience gave him to make his point on a deeper emotional level.

Working with the present moment and responding do what's happening isn't something that you learn by reading a bunch of principles. It's very much about not being fixated on the principles and just going with the flow.

There was also a time where he put his hand into his trousers. He's a toastmaster. He knows that you aren't supposed to put your hand into your trousers. He probably gave feedback to other people at a toastmasters meeting about how it's bad to put your hand into your trousers in the past.

Knowing not to put your hand into your trousers doesn't seem enough. There seem to be deeper reasons of why human put their hand sometimes into their trousers while public speaking. I would call it generally emotional management.

If you have the wrong emotions while standing in front of a crowd doing public speaking than your body while give it off. There are things you can do to try to fake it but it still looks artificial. If you are a politician it's okay to look artificial on stage. If you look like you are powerful that's enough to get people's respect.

In low key social interactions looking artificial often isn't okay.

In pickup terms it's called inner game. It's important that various thought patterns about not being worthy of attention of other people don't trigger. It's important to feel at ease.

If you try to use a bunch of principles to decide when to laugh how loud at what joke, you aren't really enjoying the joke in the first place. Simply letting go of worrying about outcomes is hard. I personally often struggle with letting go. It's very easy to understand but hard to implement.

If social skills are best learned through observation, then why are they so unevenly distributed amongst people who aren't hermits?

Or rather, I think they are learned as a child the way language is learned. It's a subconscious process that occurs naturally when those skills are observed by a young child. However, with social skills at least, different people seem to plateau in their development at different places, and further observation doesn't always lead to further improvement.

Most people know someone with excellent social skills, yet that person continues to outperform them. There are several reasons this could be the case. The skilled person (S) might be using skills that affect observers who are not consciously aware of the skill and its effect. This could involve subtle actions, such as skillful use of body language, more involved psychological manipulation, etc.

In some cases, becoming aware of those strategies may help observers employ them as well. This seems to be the premise of a lot of PUA blogs, as well as social skill self-help books. However, one notable pattern I've observed in these social skill advice dispensing media is that they all instruct their audience to actually practice the actions they describe, whether it's complimenting five people a day, purposefully taking a bold stance in a meeting, or negging a hot girl. Whatever the quality of the specific advice, actual physical practice is usually emphasized. Social skills workshops and therapy seem to often be taught in with a repetitive "observe and repeat" pattern.

This makes sense, I think. Some socially awkward people are clueless about their faux pas, but many struggle with excessive self-consciousness, often "overthinking" the situation until anything they do comes out strained. A solution for this is to perform a skill so many times it moves from challenging to subconscious, or from System II to System I. Models do this, practicing their best smile until it's the one they make when the camera is on them.

Overall, I feel like social skills are far more procedural than observational for adults. One interesting subset of strategies involve observation and practice at the same time. Mimicking body language makes people like you more. Sort of similarly, people often become more skilled in many dimensions when they think of themselves as actors acting out the part of someone who has that skill. For example, the advice to "think like a trader" reduces loss aversion. I know people who find it easier to go into social situations as if they are a scene from a play they are acting out. I'm not sure what the long-term psychological effects are, but it does seem to help a lot in the short-term.

So, I'm skeptical that a database of exceptional examples and explanations (although fun to collect) would be useful to people who could not be more easily helped by general advice they can already find on the internet. A database of simple strategies that have been rigorously demonstrated to improve social skills might be worthwhile.

I'm guessing that the best way to learn would be through some sort of software that could converse with you and provide immediate, specific feedback about one's deviations from socially normal or optimal behavior, although such software might well lead to excessive stylistic conformity. Another option might be one that led an individual to local maxima give zir current style. I know this is sort of on the way.

This is one in a whole bunch of posts I've seen on here to the effect of "the community should band together and create this cool thing."

Historically, has this ever worked?

Seems like by definition the people who are on here a lot (and therefore likely to see the post) are the people who are either:

1. Posting a lot to promote some cool project they're already working on. or
2. Posting a lot because they tend be types who are big on talk and small on action.

It doesn't seem like either type would be great to recruit to build a new project. Rather, if this is something you think is valuable, I'd work on creating it yourself.

There was a post (which I unfortunately couldn't locate) that argued that rationalists should aspire to more ...

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