What Exactly Is "The Big Picture"?

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My special interest is social science, but I still have trouble with the "little" social things.

Yet we're said to be good with details and have trouble with the big picture.

Isn't what goes on between groups in society, between nations and governments and all that a "bigger" picture than what goes on at a more micro level(relationships between people)?

Am I taking the phrase "big picture" too literally?

And why doesn't knowing about all these higher order social facts (and even having drawn my own conclusions and theories) not given me enough knowledge to eliminate my symptoms by now? Shouldn't some of the things I learned trickle down and be applicable to interpersonal relations? Shouldn't social science logically help a person's social skills? Maybe it has helped a little but it definitely hasn't been a complete replacement.

For me, the big picture is the overview of whatever situation I'm involved in - e.g. if I'm transferring my cassette collection to digital audio, the detail is the individual cassettes and the process of playing them into the computer, naming the audio files, etc., while the big picture is stuff like "what am I trying to achieve with this whole project? Should I take a break now? How long will the tape player last before the heads wear out? Do I really want a digital copy of every tape I have? How does this project fit into my life's work? Are there better ways of doing this? How is the time spent on this work affecting my marriage/social life/job?"

For a social situation, the detail is basically "oh, here's a person, best run the social scripts....now what are they saying? What's my answer?" while the big picture is "who is this person? Why are we associating together? How do they fit into my social scheme? How long have I known them? Do we have past problems that remain unresolved? At what social stage are we in our friendship? What areas do we next want to develop together?"

The "big picture" usually applies to a higher level of abstraction as opposed to the details. Sometimes one is looking at the details too hard and lose some meaning of the situation.

Example:
A person has talked with you about a bad experience they have had every day for two weeks.

Good details to know would be:
Who did what to whom?
When did it happen?
Why do you thin it happened?

A more abstract "big picture" question would be:
Why is this person keep telling you this story over and over for two weeks? Are they trying to influence you somehow?

the way i see it, that phrase means something like looking at an entire television screen as a whole instead of focusing on individual pixels.

You can learn social science all you want but your brain isn't wired for social skills. It's going to take years of practice to see little improvements. It depends on how bad your social skills are now.
I know a lot of social rules but I can't put these into practice. My lack of empathy has turned into too much that it paralyzes me. My knowledge of the wrong thing to say makes me barely speak. I prefer to speak though so I will probably end up saying something that will be taken the wrong way.
I may be ok in a controlled environment but in a strange one and especially when being bombarded with a lot of sensory information it's impossible to follow and join in on conversations.

I hope that made sense. It's getting late over here.

For every micro there is a macro, but in turn that macro is a micro for another step and that micro is a macro. Basically there are certain steps and stages of everything and the farther away the 2 points of comparison the less knowledge you can derive from comparing the 2 together. The social information your going to gain from studying say the cold war relations between the United States and Russia aren't going to help much when trying to understand 2 kids fighting over a ball at recess. The principals may be the same but the steps on the ladder so to speak are so far removed that it's almost impossible to relate the two. So I don't believe your taking it too literally, it just your jumping to many steps on the ladder in your comparisons =)

The symptoms aren't ever going away, that's just a cold hard fact. I consider myself fairly well adjusted socially now a days but I still have all the tendencies and quirks as I had before. While it does get easier, I don't think I'll ever be completely fluid in my conversation or social interaction. I'm fine with that and I use it to my advantage to crack jokes about it and people generally over look the major downfalls I have socially because of it. When I'm talking I have to mentally stop myself remember to look around at peoples faces and at their eyes and make a mental judgment to continue or inject with a timely "ya but don't get me started on that", cue laughter and someone else picks up the conversation and I go from there.

Social science is a practical science you can sit and read and gather information on it all day long for years but it won't help you one bit unless you go out and use that information. You need to use what your learned to draw your own conclusions based on the social interactions and situations you were in that day. Try new things see how they effect conversation, peoples reactions, and their view on you then at the end of the day or when you get some alone time reflect on why what happened did. Come out with some conclusions and then go back out there and test them. Your gonna crash and burn at some point, I know I did many times but ya just caulk that one up to a bad experience, get back out there =)

It almost seems like you could conceptualize that last question as a psychology question or social psychology question. Maybe even a game theory question, but I'd have to know more about the context first to be sure.

It seems like when it comes to really complex things like how the government should be run, what policies there should be, what principles should be embodied, how countries should interact, the meaning behind the actions of nations and minority groups, etc. I grasp it really fast and can get very abstract about it. I even feel huge bursts of empathy when reading about things like famine and genocide even though I know none of the people personally. Even if no personal anecdotes are used I think about what is happening there and I'm moved by it.

But then I'm at a loss in regular everyday social situations. It's a paradox I'm having trouble understanding.

I suppose abstraction can never be achieved without some previous knowledge of more concrete levels of information, just you don't need every little detail because at some point enough will do for making an educated guess. Kind of like how really hard, abstract math is often easy for some people on the spectrum. Neurotypicals get the "big picture" in social situations because the information to build off of is simply hardwired into their DNA.

Maybe I get the "big picture" in large, removed social situations because the information on those subjects just seemed to be a lot more interesting and important than figuring out people in day-to-day life. I care more about starving children in Africa and victims of war and genocide than about the people nextdoor. Maybe I'd actually have more social skills if I grew up in an impoverished third world nation, because what's important to me about people would be going on all around me all the time and I would've had actual opportunities to work on making the world a better place instead of just reading about it and thinking and coming up with ideas I've unfortunately had no time to put into practice.

It also seems like my whole life my empathy seems to be focused on suffering. I don't care about your new girlfriend/job/movie you like but if you are homeless, starving, have a serious illness/lost someone close I am overcome with emotion. This one thing actually makes me still unsure if I have AS. Maybe it's all due to depression. An NT depressed person would emphasize better with suffering because that is what they are feeling themselves. Someone with severe depression could even completely suppress any empathy for things that don't involve suffering. I do socialize better when I'm happy. It's all very confusing to me trying to figure out if I have Asperger's. I keep becoming sure, then finding reasons to doubt it again, then becoming sure again. There's just too much in my past, even recent past for me to tell whether it's depression, anxiety, Asperger's, or lack of practice(thanks to past depression and anxiety).

You are thinking just like an aspie, in fact just like I do.
This is a fascinating thread!

You are hoping that with a better understanding of the theory of social interactions, that this will translate into a better understanding in real-world interactions.
Am I right? The answer is only partially.
Yes, I too have spent many hours thinking about this, as well as read a lot about it.

The main difference is that AS people think about this a lot about this stuff and try to apply it
compared with NT people who find it instinctual. It is that gut-level instinct that NT people have that creates the main differences.

The paradox you talk about has to do with the non-verbal communication that takes place in a face-to-face interaction. As well as other strange things NT people like to do.

Both an AS person and NT person feel when someone is suffering. The lack of empathy thing is misstated. The lack of empathy refers specifically to the fact that AS people do not instinctively understand the mindset of NT people. It does not mean a lack of sympathy. There are lots of threads on WP that discuss "theory of mind".

Here is a strange thing NT people like to do: share useless trivia. I don't care about your girl(or boy)friends, or what movies you're into either.
"finding common ground" and "sharing useless trivia" are very important for a lot of people.
If you look at a lot of pop culture media--it is full of meaningless drivel.

I am sorry my answer was so brief, but I'm feeling tired.

You sound fine to me and your post was great. Social interactions is a fascinating topic.

I think what happens is that they're giving away lots of clues about what makes them tick, when they share trivial information about celebrities, partners, entertainment, etc. Once you know what drives a person, you can compare that with your own attitudes and decide whether there's anything you can share.

Yep.

I never understood the analogy either. Of course i get pixels are details and the entire tv screen is the ''big picture'' but that doesnt explain enough its just stating the obvious its just a different wording.

the theory will help you to some degree but the only way you really learn social skills is from real life experience.
Just as you have to train your muscles with weights. Knowledge about biology,food, training exercises will help you understand what you can do to improve but it will not literally make your muscles grow.

My own experience is that my social set back is largely because i spend such little time training it. Whereas most people i know want to spend as much time as possible in the company of others and so they are perfecting their skills almost all their waking hours.

same goes for drawing. You do not become a master by spending 1 hour a week on it, you have to draw ALL the time.

because of this I do not want to improve my social skills because i know i will have to do it ALL the time id rather do 1 hour a week even if it means lagging behind my peers.

Just as an example i reliably know 3 streets in my hometown, where others seem to know all of the street names in the town. I think this is because they spend their whole life exchanging this information.

I think that with respect to AS, it refers to a specific difficulty which can be illustrated by this:
So the purpose and original impetus for doing something is lost amongst the fine details, and the task remains uncompleted.

There must be millions of ways of explaining it, and not all of them work on everybody.

One way is that it's like looking at the contents of a file on a computer - while you're focussed on the contents, you're looking at the detail, the Small Picture. Step back a little and you'll see that you were looking at one of a group of files......step back a little more and you'll see that the group of files is in a folder, and that there are several folders, each containing files. Aspies tend to get trapped at the level of the individual file, whereas NTs are more aware of that file's place in the folder, even while they're working on the file's details. They can rapidly flip back and forth between the two states of awareness, and so they can more easily manage their activities.

Another way of seeing it is that every object of interest has a context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_%28language_use%29
Aspies tend to make inappropriate comments because they have trouble appreciating the context in which they are making those comments.

All the theories come up with in this thread are really interesting and I think equally applicable.

Here's my experience, for what it's worth: I do consider myself an extremely "big-picture" person in that if I don't consciously see how whatever I am doing, from making lunch to looking for a job, will ultimately lead to me figuring out the meaning of life (probably at the end of my life, but still), I see no point in doing it and just want to lie in bed and not exist.

I also am constantly analyzing social interactions on a large scale, building a neverending mosaic from whatever small pieces I gather.

I see too many possibilities, is the problem, for any given human interaction. I see all the possible ways of reacting and they all seem equally doable, though obviously I can guess some would cause some pretty negative reactions in whoever I'm interacting with. NTs seem to have an instinctive sense that guides them automatically to the "correct" way of acting and responding around others. When I see them in action I realize that their way is indeed "safest" and least likely to cause any kind of disharmony and I end up copying a lot of their reactions in later situations I find similar, although no two situations are exactly alike of course and I usually fail by misapplying a behavior in an ever-so-slightly-different context.

Sometimes though disharmony can be good though I think. It's interesting anyway. It leads to new kinds of interaction instead of the same interactional memes carbon-copied over and over and over again by NTs who observe an interaction and repeat is successfully with another NT watching who then does the same.

But I still don't understand how they are so good at knowing how to subtly employ these memetic behaviors. Maybe cause they don't see every single flinch and odd mouth movement or whatever that everyone makes from time to time but that NT brains seems to filter out in favor of more sturdy socially recognizable cues like "embarrassed-but-proud smile" and other distinct expressions you can pick out on any soap opera-like show and that I believe are somewhat socially learned from a communal pool of "emotionally significant expressions."

Anyway just my rambling thoughts on the matter.

I know where you're coming from, because I am the same regarding social areas, which is why I've said for years that I love humanity but I hate people.

For me, the big picture problem comes up most noticeably in the area of work. I am self-employed, but I have a lot of difficulty if someone wants me to do a project for them all by myself. That means handling the whole of the job, the planning, the delegating, putting it all together. I have a much easier time if I'm working on a project that someone else is leading and then I can just focus on my part of it.

Yes, people tend to think of conflict as completely bad, but it's a very important part of the process of interacting....I think it's quite possible that an Aspie can clear a few blocks via social "ineptitude," when mainstream NTs would shy away from raising the thorny issues that have to be raised to clear the blocks. Like the Emperor's New Clothes.


Hmmm......one of my problems is that if a person seems angry, I feel as if they've always been angry, with me, and always will be, and their anger seems absolute. A NT would probably know straight away that it was just a flash in the pan. I think they come to understand individuals by watching them for a long time, so individual observations don't register as such, only when they've observed the same thing a few times over in the same person, then it registers as something definite about them.