It seems to me that most of the advice when it comes to social skills is, while plausible, presented on a trust/experience basis. Are there any resources that give you *data-backed* social advice?

2 comments

  1. I’m not sure how you’d imagine that looking like. Scientific experiments are highly contrived situations where participants basically have to complete a questionnaire rating a (real or imagined) person’s traits or likeability on a certain scale. Or there could be studies identifying certain self-presentation elements in social media profiles and correlating those with friend/follower count. You may occasionally stumble upon data-backed “tricks” like that thing where the brain confuses general arousal (thrill/fear) with sexual arousal, and we happen to find people more attractive after being in an adrenaline-inducing situation with them. But these aren’t, and shouldn’t be, the right places to look at for social skills progress. We have more data and statistics than we know what to do with already; the modern challenge is more about finding sources that make sense of them and turn them into a narrative.

    For something sort of like what you’re looking for, there’s Arthur C. Brooks’s column on happiness in *The Atlantic*, but that only coincidentally touches upon social life.

  2. How does that data help? For example it is said that anywhere from 40-93 percent of communication is nonverbal.

    But that doesn’t really tell you what to DO or how to CONNECT. So how does information help? Or, what kinds of info are you looking for?

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