The No-Nonsense Guide to Winning At Social Skills As An Autistic Person
Compiled from multiple sources (note: not mostly based on personal experience)
There has been a lot of discourse in recent years about the practice of improving social skills as an autistic person. Some people say that it is an important part of being a successful person, and that autistic people in particular should put a serious effort into improving social skills. Other people say that this is a harmful practice, that it is fundamentally not possible, and that it will serve to burn out autistic people, and if pushed at too young an age, even traumatize them. The second group has unfortunately had such a dominance over discourse led by autistic people that it is hard to find advice, written by autistic people for autistic people, about how to improve social skills. This post is intended to fill that gap.
This guide is intended for autistic people who have trouble displaying the social skills that are commonly expected within neurotypical society, and wish to be better able to do so. In short, this guide is for people who want to win at social skills.
Statistically speaking, the autistic people with the most difficulty in winning at social skills tend to be diagnosed earlier. The lack of early-diagnosed voices in the online autism community likely makes it even harder to get this sort of advice, and rest assured, I will be writing about this issue at some point within this century, if I am not killed by a superintelligent AI first.
I would like to provide a brief disclaimer first, that this guide is not for everyone. Not everyone stands to benefit from hearing this advice, just as not everyone stands to benefit from advice about how to stop camouflaging autism-related traits and “be yourself” (whatever that means). I am not an authority on the subject of autism and social skills, and I have only partially tried this advice. Still, this seems to be the best compilation that I know of from the sources that exist.
Part 1: How to Start
One point when a lot of people go wrong in their social skills journey is in starting out. Often, people will end up picking the wrong framework for improving their social skills when they start, and it will end up causing problems for the whole project. Note that this is true of a lot of self-improvement efforts, and not just improving social skills as an autistic adult. Nevertheless, it’s still important to consider how this specifically applies to social skills.
Pick a goal large enough to overcome the challenges involved.
Self-improvement is hard work, and that goes double whenever you’re targeting something inherently difficult for you (e.g. improving social skills as an autistic adult). This is the part where I most often see autistic adults fail in their efforts to improve social skills. Often, they pick some sort of goal, but it’s not really based in what they truly want. If your goal is “conform to expectations,” that goal is not large enough to overcome the challenges involved. If your goal is “have people feel more comfortable around me,” that goal is not large enough to overcome the challenges involved. If your goal is “stop a terrorist cell from destroying the Grand Coulee Dam, flooding multiple cities in Washington, and wiping out the power grid along much of the West Coast,” that goal is large enough.
However, not all of us are Tom Clancy protagonists, and so a typical goal will not end up being that theatrical in nature. Still, once you’ve found something genuinely important to do in your life, and you feel that improving your social skills will dramatically improve your ability to carry that out, this will tend to serve as a suitable motivation for improving your social skills. These will overwhelmingly tend to be altruistically motivated goals, as goals that are selfish in nature will tend to be less motivating when things get hard for you personally. For me, goals related to Effective Altruism serve that role quite well, but your mileage may vary.
Be whatever version of yourself will best satisfy your goals.
We’ve all heard the aphorism, “be yourself.” But in my opinion, this phrase is completely and utterly meaningless. Is there any other person you can be, besides yourself? In what situation can you not be yourself, and if you are not yourself, then doesn’t the term “yourself” no longer take its ordinary meaning? And if “yourself” no longer has its ordinary meaning, then why not just use other words that have this new meaning as their ordinary meaning? But I digress.
My point is, it is possible to improve without being someone else: in fact, it is the only way in which it is possible to improve. More importantly, there is not a dichotomy between “being inauthentic” and “not improving.” Rather, part of improving is realizing that there is a version of yourself that will better satisfy your goals than your current self can, and trying to be this version of yourself.
Whenever you are facing a difficult social situation, imagine that you are looking at the situation from outside, and judge how to behave from that vantage point.
Often, when you’re looking at a situation too personally, it will end up clouding your judgment, and you may say or do things which you will later regret. One way to avoid this is by not taking these situations too seriously, but often they are quite serious and warrant serious attention. The approach that I most prefer here is the approach of looking at the situation from the outside, and using your decision in that framework.
What do I mean by “from the outside”? I mean contextualizing the situation as if it is happening to someone else. Imagine a friend going through that situation: what would you tell them? Imagine that you’re reading a book where someone goes through this and it goes well; what did they do? Imagine that you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and your character faces this situation: how do you resolve it?
This approach, in my mind, allows you to best strike the balance between fully understanding a situation and not letting its seriousness impair your judgment. It will allow you to understand how serious a situation is, but also think it through while imagining that it is not happening to you personally, and thus prevent your personal biases from interfering with a solution.
Part 2: Specific advice
The previous advice focuses mostly on what to do before starting out on a project to improve your social skills. However, the most important part of social interaction is obviously the social interaction itself, so here is some specific advice for how to improve social skills at a fairly concrete level.
Observe what your face and body are doing.
One important thing that autistic people tend to struggle with noticing, but neurotypical conversation partners tend to judge people based on, is how a person's face and body are moving. This skill is very hard to teach explicitly, so you should try to practice it, ideally with a partner who understands what you are trying to do and is willing to give appropriate feedback. When a partner is not available, or if you cannot find a partner, it can be good to practice these skills while facing a mirror to make sure that they look good.
One trick to help in making your face and body movements more socially acceptable is to copy whatever your partner in conversation is doing. If you have trouble recognizing what they are doing, try to appear generally relaxed, but interested.
A lot of sources have mentioned eye contact as an important skill here, but it is largely not important, even with neurotypical conversational partners. However, it is good to start a conversation with a few seconds of eye contact, if possible. After that point, people will usually be OK so long as your head is turned in their general direction, and so long as you stand facing towards them.
Develop scripts for common social situations, and rehearse them exhaustively.
A common strategy for making social skills more automatic is to “script” social situations. While this strategy has its disadvantages, it can certainly be helpful for common social situations. If I were to implement this strategy, I’d limit it to the five or ten most common social interactions that I have, in which I’m already following a repetitive pattern of interaction. Often, movies and TV (particularly ones that show realistic social interactions) will give a good impression of how people act in these common social situations, and so could be used as the basis for scripting.
In situations where scripting is not possible, the best advice I have is to think about how a socially skilled person would respond in a situation, and then do that. The performance of AI text-prediction systems like GPT can be improved by asking them to write what an experienced writer would write; the same thing likely works for you and your social skills.
Stim in ways that will not be disruptive.
A lot of skills training for autistic people (e.g. some varieties of ABA) is focused on suppressing stims. This is often an unproductive approach to dealing with stimming, which is a natural impulse which cannot easily be suppressed. Rather, the important skill when preventing a conversation from being disrupted by stimming is to, you guessed it, stim in ways that will not be disruptive. Even among neurotypicals, some amount of stimming is acceptable, and so it should not be suppressed entirely.
The stims that work for each individual person will be very variable, but one stim I’ve been using to great effect recently is adjusting the position of a ring on my finger: it doesn’t make too much noise and provides a good amount of tactile stimulation for me without being too distracting to other people.
Monitor volume and rate of speech.
Two things that I, along with many other autistic people I know, struggle with are controlling my volume and controlling my rate of speech. This is one of the simplest on the list in terms of knowing what to do, but one of the most difficult in terms of recognizing when you need to do it.
One good trick? If your conversation partner starts looking away when you talk, it may be a sign that you’re too loud. Another sign? If you keep interrupting your conversation partner, it may be a sign that your pacing is too fast.
Maintain appropriate personal space when talking to someone.
This is a fairly basic one, but often autistic people will stand too close or too far away from someone when they’re talking to them. A good rule of thumb is to stay between three and six feet away from someone when you’re talking to them. I don’t really have much more to say on this one other than to practice this in your conversations, and ask for feedback about how you did.
Read other people’s reactions to see when you’re doing well or poorly.
Unfortunately, people will basically never give you direct feedback as to when you’re doing well or poorly. Sometimes, even when a partner agrees to help you with that, they may forget. This means that the most reliable means of judging your own social performance is to read other people’s reactions.
Facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language are all important parts of people’s reactions to you, but an equally important part that many social skills programs don’t pay as much attention to is: how are they speaking? Is there something they seem to be talking around that they’re not willing to say outright? Are they trying to change the subject? Do they seem receptive to your discussion, or are they perceiving this as a hostile debate?
But that just kicks the can down the road: how do you tell how well you can read other people’s reactions? The best advice I have here is to watch movies or TV with a cooperative partner (or videos taken of yourself during social interactions, if available), and periodically pause at agreed-upon times and discuss what you think the characters are feeling and trying to do. Focus primarily on movies and TV that show a lot of social interactions, complex character motivations, and realistic settings.
Avoid infodumping.
One thing that can be really enjoyable for autistic people, but disruptive in a conversational setting, is infodumping. It’s important to recognize that, although whatever you’re talking about may be really interesting to you, people have stuff going on in their own lives already. Furthermore, talking all about what you want to talk about means that you won’t hear whatever the other person has to say, since most neurotypical people are too polite to interrupt with what they have to say.
If you still really want to talk about whatever it is you’re so interested in, explain it for a few short sentences, and then pause for about ten seconds. If the other person asks to continue, then feel free to do so! If they bring up something else, let the conversation flow where it is naturally going; you’ll probably hear something plenty interesting that way, if you’re hanging out with the right people.
Read other resources on social skills.
This is nowhere close to the definitive resource on social skills, and there are many other resources out there. Unfortunately, many of them address subjects that may not be relevant to you. Many of them are focused on children or younger teenagers, so even those skills that are useful for adults are often taught in an oversimplified or irrelevant way. Still more assume a level of social ability beyond many people’s, and so may become awkward when implemented without those pre-existing social abilities.
That being said, I have had two books consistently recommended to me across my research. The first one is Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships by Sean Barron and Temple Grandin, which discusses social rules as a concept through the lens of two successful autistic adults. The second one is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, which is a classic guide for socializing intended for a wider audience.
Make a plan to improve.
Finally, reading this post is not enough to significantly improve your social skills. The hardest part of this guide is to actually follow the advice I give, and often, factors relating to your autism may make that even harder than it would be for other skills. What this plan would involve varies from person to person, but I would suggest starting out by finding a partner of some sort. Be clear with your partner that you are autistic, and want to generally improve your social skills. Let them know that you are open to honest constructive feedback, even when it wouldn’t be appropriate in other situations. As much as you can, tell them about what you’re working on, but also tell them if you’re unsure about what you’re working on, so that they can help you figure that out. And finally, try to arrange periodic practice sessions with them on areas of improvement, so that you can make consistent progress.
I hope that this guide can be of use to all the autistic people out there who want to win at social skills, and I expect that it may be helpful to plenty of people who may have some autistic traits without being autistic. In the meantime, the first chapters of “Dr. Mindy” are pretty high on my list of writing (sorry for the delay), but they may be coming after some shorter-form nonfiction content I have planned.
Sources
https://embrace-autism.com/cat-q/#test
https://www.tiimoapp.com/blog/masters-of-masking-autistic-men-who-camouflage/
https://www.healthline.com/health/autism/autism-masking#definition
https://kennethrobersonphd.com/a-guide-to-developing-social-skills-in-adults-with-aspergers/
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Coaching-Adults-Autism-Spectrum/dp/1737107406/ref=sr_1_4?crid=PMG906ZT5X5K&keywords=social+skills+for+adults+on+the+spectrum&qid=1674252617&sprefix=social+skills+for+adults+on%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-4
https://www.amazon.com/AWKWARD-Social-Donts-Being-Young/dp/1941765793/ref=sr_1_1?crid=PMG906ZT5X5K&keywords=social+skills+for+adults+on+the+spectrum&qid=1674252691&sprefix=social+skills+for+adults+on%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-1
https://www.wikihow.com/Stim-Discreetly
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/movieplot_threa_1.html
Image credit: DALL-E 2