Behavior mirroring, developing social skills in real situations without logical analysis
I've had difficulty interacting in social environments and I believe that a large part of this is just that I never learned how to. Thinking about it today I can see two reasons:
- first I have always enjoyed making things, and spent much of my childhood doing this, not seeing value in interacting with other people.
- Second, I grew up without good role models for how to do social interactions as my parents are very isolated.
Current mainstream approaches may attempt to solve these kinds of difficulties through logical analysis and rehearsing situations in a therapy office.
While I don't wish to discourage you from trying things, I can say that this does not work for me. My mind can not recall things learned in that way within the context of real interactions.
I've recently been thinking about this problem, and believe that mirroring someone may be a good way of developing social skills directly within the contexts that they will be applied:
- Find someone who is good at social interaction.
- They interact with other people as they normally would, and you shadow them - with you appearing 'as a friend of theirs' from the perspective of others.
- As they are doing so, you pay attention to what they are doing and repeat those things in your mind. Don't try to logically analyze it, just notice and repeat in your mind's ear, and imagine 'performing' their body language.
Through doing so, the person who is mirroring will gradually pick up on the approaches, communication patterns and body language of the 'lead', largely subconsciously.
Humans in a sense have two brains, the conscious, which is what you're actively aware of, and the subconscious, which handles the things you do automatically. For example, if you want to walk to the other side of the room, you don't have to think about every muscle movement required to do so.
Teaching in recent times has often focused on logical analysis and communication through logical explanation, but it is not the only way. People are very good at learning from observation, and this can be seen in the teaching of many types of folk dance, as well as other physical activities like Yoga, where a teacher will physically 'act out' what to do, and the students observe and copy.
The idea behind behavior mirroring is to applying this idea to learning social interactions. By doing so, one can develop connections between things that are appropriate to say and do, with visual and other sensory information of the kinds of situations they are being used in. Thus when the individual is exposed to a similar situation, they will more instinctively know how to act.
I further believe that the recent boom in machine learning ('AI') technology demonstrates that logical analysis is a flawed teaching approach, because it demonstrates that human capacity for logical reasoning is not strong enough to understand human behaviors and communication.
Traditional approaches to AI programming (symbolic AI) required that someone fully understand how something works in order to describe this to a computer as a series of logical statements. It appears to me that AI only started to get 'good' after we completely gave up on this, and instead started modeling communication with statistical models trained using many examples of real human communication.
What things could cause difficulty in social interaction, and how can mirroring help?
Human social interaction is a combination of innate, 'instinctual' behaviors that result from genetics, and factors which are learned environmentally from parents and others in one's environment.
Difficulties in social interactions can arise from quite a few potential sources, like:
Environmental factors
If someone's parents lack social experience they may not be able to effectively model how to do social interactions to a child, and the child will not learn what to do.
Mirroring is in a sense 're-parenting', filling in that missing information.
Social anxiety
Social anxiety is a fear of being in social situations, which could cause someone to avoid social interactions entirely, or retreat into a corner in social environments. It can manifest due to bullying, other traumatic situations associated with social interactions, and genetic factors.
This can be solved through exposure therapy, gradually exposing oneself to social environments. Doing so trains the subconscious that the situation actually is safe, and being with someone who is known, and with who one already feels safe can help.
Differences in neurotype
Differences in neurotype between individuals can cause communication issues for many reasons. For example, people of an autistic neurotype may have reduced herd instinct, being driven by their own interests. It is possible that such a person may not see value in interacting with other people, and not learn social behaviors as a result.
In this case they may simply not know what to do in social environments, and by having someone experienced model social interactions and observe, one can willingly 'absorb' what they are doing and train their subconscious mind, allowing them to fill in that missing information.
But communication difficulties can also arise between different neurotypes for other reasons. By analogy, imagine that you love wensleydale cheese, and someone else loves blue Stilton. Say that for some reason both of these people have no idea that other kinds of cheese exist, and they start to talk via email, it may be confusing when the person discussing Stilton describes their cheese as blue, as this would be confusing to the wensleydale person, as their concept of what 'cheese' is, is very different.
This is called the 'double empathy problem', and can arise for numerous reasons including neurotype, upbringing, and cultural factors. Modeling can help, because insights can be offered into the way the other person perceives things.
Differences in neurotype may also lead to difficulty in information processing at a hardware level, for example in reading facial expressions, or processing auditory information. I don't know if in-person modeling could help with this.
Thoughts on behavior mirroring in practice
Step 1
The first step is to find someone who can model for you. Just be with them as they interact with people they normally would. As they are doing that, listen to what they are saying, and repeat it back to yourself in your head. At the same time, watch their body language and imagine doing the same. Research has shown that imagining doing an action provides the same practice as acting it out physically.
Also:
- It is important to be aware and accepting of why they are doing it (many autistic people can choose not to pay attention to things if they are not interested in them).
- Don't try to logically analyze what someone is doing, just observe and copy.
Repeat this step for a while, perhaps daily for a few weeks, and at some point you'll start to have an innate sense of how to act in different environments.
Step 2
After a while once you have some feeling of what to do, continue to interact with other people as a pair, but now you try to initiate the conversation. This allows your assistant to observe what you're doing, and offer feedback.
I suspect that, much like learning a musical instrument, this kind of thing needs to be practiced regularly, and won't be remembered if it isn't due to the forgetting curve.
Step 3
After doing the above for some time, you will start to feel more confidant and know what to do. This it will become possible to try social interactions without your assistant.
FAQ
Is this authentic to the individual?
I believe that the recent developments in machine learning technology have demonstrated that human language and communication is just a set of complex patterns. These 'AI' systems are trained using huge numbers of examples taken from real human communications, allowing a model to be created of how language 'works'.
Humans actually learn to speak in much the same way, by listening to their parents and others on their environment communicating when they are children. If someone has not learned how to do this, possibly because of the environment they grew up in, then 'how to interact' with people is 'missing information', and it could be said that this individual does not have an 'authentic' communication style yet.
I feel that people will naturally chose to interact with people that they get along with, and thus it could be said that they will naturally choose a mentor who aligns with their own values, and what they learn from them would thus be as authentic as is possible.
How is this different from autistic masking?
I don't know that it is different because I am not capable of masking in that sense. It may be different based on what I understand about this, given how other people have described 'masking':
- Masking may be trying to emulate social behaviors using the conscious mind, forming 'scripts' in the sense that an actor in a play may do.
- The goal of mirroring is to train the subconscious brain, without the conscious mind being involved in the process.
Isn't it too limiting to base one's communication on only a single model person?
Yes, but the point is to learn some basics from one person to help you get started. Once you've gotten started, it will then be more straightforward to start also mirroring other people to develop a more diverse communication style, because you've already got some confidence with approaching people and initiating interactions.
Why not learn conversations from media?
I don't think that media like films or TV are an accurate representation of how people communicate in the real world.
Personal experiences with behavior mirroring
I have tried doing this myself with a friend in some limited situations so far, and I so believe that it is helping. It however is too early to say more.