A hint on social intelligence

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Social intelligence is much about being self-centred, self-serving, self-important, superficial and egoistic while simultaneously pretending one genuinely cares about one's surroundings. In reality the social intelligent person only cares about his surroundings if the surroundings benefit himself - so ultimately he only genuinely/unconditionally cares about himself. Because as soon as some part of the surroundings are unbeneficial to him, he should stop "caring" about them.

This is the social attitude that is the most beneficial for survival - that's why it's considered "intelligent"/correct.


As a result, all "normal" social interaction carry some amount of pretendence, and I think that's why some of us have a problem with it. Many autistics prefer honesty and truth, and social interaction actually carry quite the opposite characteristics.

Being aware of this superficiality, it becomes quite a lot harder to achieve genuine feelings as to what regards friendships, girl-/boyfriends etc.

What you describe sounds closer to sociopathy or narcissism than true social intelligence. Yes, there is an important element of lying, and/or hiding one's self-serving interests, in social intelligence. But most NTs have a good balance of cognitive and emotive empathy, which means that they are often more willing to lie for the sake of others they consider one of their own (white lies) than for themselves. Although they will do both.

A couple books I read recently, "Delusions of Gender" by Cordelia Fine and "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty" by Dan Ariely, gave me the best model yet as to how some of the most confusing and complex social behaviors in most of us non-autistics really work. Basically, that our behavior - including how much we lie and what we lie about - is often determined by our intuitively gathered information about social roles plus contextual clues about which social role of ours is in play (e.g. our gender vs. our occupation vs. our religion). Somehow make us think of female stereotypes, or maybe even just flash the word "woman" in front of us for a fraction of a second before we can consciously read it, and all of a sudden we'll act upon female stereotypes. Make us take a pledge of honesty before a test, or make us associate dishonesty with a group we have identified as enemies or rivals, and we'll cheat less. Or make us think of a creative person or see one of our own cheating, and we'll cheat more. In any of these cases, we'll probably make up some story in order to reduce our sense of cognitive dissonance from not understanding why we act the way we do in these situations, because we're often not aware that we're picking up these role cues in the first place.

We non-autistic people are both self-centered and other-oriented, and unless we're psych buffs fascinated with all of our own stupid human tricks, we tend to do a lot of mental gymnastics trying to just maintain a simple sense of ourselves as "good people" when it's really way more complicated and fascinating than that. In any case, it seems to work most of the time for most people. And since I see a lot of evidence for this role-cue behavior in myself (e.g. changing scores on the Aspie Quiz based on whether I think of myself in terms of my socially awkward childhood or my finally-fitting-in current state), I think a lot of the trouble I had socially growing up might be explained by conflicts between different roles I had, or over-attachment to certain roles like "smart person" and "honest person" even if they conflicted with the more important roles of "nice person" or "cool person." (Although I'm still not comfortable with all that much lying, because at the very least I'll find myself out eventually if I lie to myself, and lying to oneself is useful in being able to lie well to others for good or bad causes.)

Gawer, while your posts have gotten clearer over the last few months, the OP above is filled with assumptions that make it difficult to respond to.

Based on your last post in this thread, I am trying to figure out if you're making an attempt to start a debate, ask for support, or if you're just making a statement that you believe to be true.

I've noticed the same thing and up until a few months ago I thought nt's were terribly self-centered liars, pretenders, hypocrites and superficial. I tried to play their game in order to get along, but it didn't work out so well. Now I have started this cognitive therapy and I'm just blown away of the multi-layered, ambiguous culture called communication. I've always known I have a bit different views on that, but I would've never thought it was so far away from the "normal" mode.

I just found out that many people blabber just for the sake of it, without having actually nothing to say. And that is reinforcing their bond in some way. I've watched a few people do just that and somehow they seem to get something out of it when for me it's almost hard to understand the sentences they'r saying. That's because it doesn't have any correlation to anything that has been said before.

I have no opinion about the matter anymore, 'cause I'm pretty much out of that game.

Even believing one's life is important is pretending - in the big scheme of things one's life is completely insignificant. One tiny dot in a huge population, and the population is one tiny dot in the big universe. One is just a part of a species trying to survive. One would soon be forgotten. And one will (most often) soon be forgotten after death.

But one should be convinced that one's life is the most important thing there could ever be. One does this by being egocentric, self-serving etc. Pretending seems to be one of the most important life skills.

Wow, you're cynical! No offense here, just an observation. It happens easily enough if a person gets picked on.

But it's not really about self-interest. Humans are social animals and we are built to take care of each other. NTs literally feel distress when they see someone else in distress, and they feel good when they help someone else. Autistics aren't much different, though for us it may have a different style. I don't need to see distress to feel the need to fix it; I don't need to be complimented to feel good about helping someone. Other than that, I'm as prosocial as anyone.

The fact is, in evolutionary terms, altruism is a benefit. Being willing to sacrifice for someone else might seem like a drawback for natural selection, but you have to see the whole picture: Humans live in groups, and a group of people who are willing to sacrifice for each other will be stronger than a group of people who are not. Over the millennia, humanoids who were altruistic have won the evolutionary game. Yeah, there are sociopathic freeloaders in our society, but they're not the majority.

Social intelligence is not about playing some game. Sure, you could play a game, and you could get power over others; if you were good at it you might even stay on the top of the heap. But that's not the point of socializing. The point of socializing is to create a network for people to draw on each others' skills and fulfill each others' needs. Everyone benefits. The best way to create this network is not to try to dominate and manipulate others, but to create real, solid connections based on trust and understanding. If you're autistic, that's hard for you, but it's worthwhile. Get interested in what it is like to be the other person. Learn from them what they know. And if they mistreat you, did you really want that connection to begin with?

I don't believe in the concept of social intelligence.

I know for a fact that I would be totally unable to butt kiss my way up a career ladder, even if I wanted to. According to Daniel Goleman, that would mean I have a low SQ (social intelligence quotient),

But is that really the correct interpretation? I actually feel very capable of comprehending and analysing complex multiperson interactions. The real problem, I feel, is that I am very different from other people in general. This is sensed by me, and them, and so any social schmoozing efforts I may wish to make will just fall flat.

What I am trying to say is that the most socially intelligent person is Joe Average, because Joe is completely surrounded by people who are on his wavelength. Now, the average person does not tend to be especially thoughtful of other peoples feelings and will tend to be quite selfish (as surely altruism and thoughtfulness must follow a bell curve like everything else?). This, I think, is the real reason that "social intelligence" appears to be linked to selfishness.