How does a non-autistic person learn social skills?

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I've heard Asperger's being explained as that it means you can't intuitively learn social skills. But all children more or less need to be taught social rules and correct social behaviour all the time. What's the difference exactly?

Usually through their parents and their peers--and also an inbred desire for friends.

They are also born, usually, with a inbred social agility, which Autistic people find difficult because it must be consciously learned in a step-by-step, time-consuming manner,

I think there's something to be said for the difference between knowing the social skill and instinctively doing it.

I know that it's a good social skill to be able to speak to a friend, ask them how something that happened in their past went and then comment on their response. "Hi, how are you? Have you moved house now? Are you all settled in? That's great!". But as much as I know that, I never ever think to ask that kind of question. I simply don't have that bit in me that says 'remember what they were doing and ask about them'. I just jump straight into what I've been doing, without remembering to ask about them, and it's not that I don't care or don't want to know, I just seem to...miss that bit out.

I guess I learned the first bit along with everyone else. I just never got that bit of me that actually uses what I've learned. If that makes sense.

Non-autistic kids do have to be taught some social rules. Like "Use your indoor voice", "Say 'please' and 'thank you'", "Don't talk about those kinds of things in public," etc.

The more subtle rules, and some not so subtle ones, they just pick up on naturally. Like how most people learn language. We are designed to learn language as children and pick up on things more than we are actually taught.

They learn to make small talk. Parents don't usually teach that. They learn what to do to fit in with peers. They learn not to say everything that's on their minds. They learn to ask others questions of themselves. They learn to lie and manipulate, if they find it necessary. They learn fashion trends. They usually just "know" what they are supposed to do in social situations. Maybe not so much in unfamiliar ones, but they are able to follow the crowd usually.

There was only very few social skills that I learnt quite late, but generally I learnt social skills rather intuitively.

But all children need to be taught SOME social skills, to an extent. At school the kids who had poor upbringing seemed more insecure, whuch affected some of their social performance. Also children learn social skills, like sharing, rather quickly when they live with brothers and sisters. Children with no brothers or sisters seemed more awkward with sharing toys or co-operating during imaginative play. Not as awkward as most autistic children typically can be, but still enough to notice.

In drama lessons at school we were taught social skills too. There are even some social skills NTs get baffled with and buy books or look online to improve social performance in certain situations.

Most learning of all topics happens accidentally by observation and trial and error.

Feedback is a big deal. People will act differently based on whether you act how they want or expect you to act. If you're a little kid, you normally want to please your parents, so if they act even a little grouchy, that works as negative reinforcement for whatever you just did, like a very slight punishment. If they are pleased or otherwise respond the way you want, that's positive reinforcement. Your instincts encourage you to act in ways that normally get you what you want or avoid what you don't want, even when the results are subtle, even if you don't have the cognitive capacity to understand cause and effect. Even a small child would get hundreds of pieces of feedback everyday, but if you have trouble reading social cues, you're probably oblivious to most of them and therefore don't learn from them.

Perspective is also an issue. It's hard to know how other people want you to act if you can't imagine things from their point of view. Theory of mind (understanding that other people even HAVE a different point of view) seems to kick in for NT kids around age four as part of the normal developmental process, but apparently it happens later for autistic folks. I think I remember mine suddenly happening around age six.

I have actively studied social psychology and human relations, so I have a lot of "book smarts" about social skills. Most NTs haven't done that and they don't have that knowledge, and I often see them make mistakes that they might not make if they had this (they upset someone and don't get what they want, when another option seems like it would have worked better for all involved). Despite that, they do a heck of a lot better than I used to do.

Comes much more naturally to kids without autism. So they pick up on it much better. Kids with autism are more lacking in aptitude.

Did you know if a child is raised by Wolves, the child will act EXACTLY like a wolf?

Non-autistic children are extremely adaptable and learn everything they know (socially) through the people around them, body language, reward and punishment. Children also have inborn skills of empathy and looking for eye contact. The brain will seek out facial expressions and body language and learn what it means through context and experience.

Some things like unwritten rules are learned at a very young age through stories and sometimes just watching other interact, i think they have a sort of inborn social 'logic' such as standing arms length away from another person.


Other things like table manners and politeness is enforced by parents and other adults

autistic people seem to lack the instinct to look for eye-contact and facial expressions or body language.

My theory is Non-autistic people have this instinct to be a part of groups and fit in socially, and its not a conscious decision. Non-autistic children will try anything and everything to fit in while autistics tend not to have this instinct or at least not completely have it. They may desire to fit in as well but the brain just seems to be more drawn to objects and studying other things rather than study human behaviour.

thats just my theory.

In general terms, I would say Zombie is at least mostly correct.

Social skills can be seen - perhaps - as a software program, loaded into the hardware of the brain. We know a great deal about differences between NT and ASD brain hardware now, compared to even a decade ago. NTs, naturally, design culture and enculturation programs which suit NT brains - they may not do that consciously, but that is what happens. And loading the same software into the brains of two very different kinds of hardware is going to produce different results.

Social learning forms the basis for NTs to learn social skills. They seem programed to imitate and form neural patterns by imitiating. Many ASD people seem to take an observant learning approach instead - they study films, they read novels, they absorb by cognitive learning rather than social learning. They study patterns, and they have the hardware to process patterns more efficiently.

At least that's my theory today, I may generate a different one tomorrow or next year...

There is a really good book called The Hidden Curriculum by Brenda Smith Myles which discussed what people with ASD need to be taught and what seems to come naturally to non-ASD people. One thing it addresses for boys is "bathroom etiquette." Like when there are like 4 empty urinals and which ones to use. A lot of instructors and therapists are female and it never dawns on them to teach ASD boys about which urinals to use when someone else is using one.

Here is an article about The Hidden Curriculum.

http://www.education.com/reference/arti ... -asperger/

Yigeren's right. Rules like "Don't talk about those things in public" and other written social rules can only be learned by being taught by parents, teachers, etc. and are not intuitively obvious to neurotypical children.

I once read something about Asperger's and rules. It said that even though Aspies may be sticklers for written rules, like not swearing on the bus, they are unaware of UNwritten rules, like not buttoning the top button on your shirt. I wish I knew where that was, but I can't find it. As crazy as it may seem, Aspies are often uptight about enforcing written social rules.

Usually, what this means is that NT children learn social skills instinctively and they develop naturally based on their developmental stage without it being explicitly "taught". (The social skills in this context means the unwritten rules, not the written ones). Children on the autism spectrum, however, have to learn them consciously and explicitly.

I think that new theories about autism are being developed all the time. Every few years, I am hearing that the brain is more "plastic" than they previously thought.

THIS.
I remember being endlessly confused as a child. I talked very late, but less than a year after that developed reading skills- and while I had the SOCIAL SKILLS of perhaps an infant really (so so SO ridiculously behind my NT classmates), but I would read and that helped immensely.
Also, I was utterly obsessed with understanding what I didn't understand- as I was CONSTANTLY being bullied or taken advantage of or in trouble.
So, I would read "He stroked his chin while pondering blah blah" and think 'Huh, guess some people do that when they are thinking about things- so when I see someone do that they may be preoccupied with thinking of XYZ.'
Or
"She buckled under the weight of her own sadness at the news. Her lips trembled, and she shakily drew in her breathe as she became dead to the world, overcome by the waves of grief ."
and thought okay characteristic A B C means sad person- person is feeling sad.
When someone does that- it means they are sad. Okay.
I would act out commercials and then "go back to the drawing board" when people did not act as they had in the commercials.
I realllly sympathized BIG TIME with the confused autistic kids I would see sometimes in movies lol.... I was like- yeah I know that feeling haha.

But nevertheless, kids NT or Autistic are capable of learning said social skills.
However, my NT neighbor friend never had to be told 99% of the things I had to be explicitly told. She was always swift and ahead of me, I could play catch up, but only after extensive time-wastingly vast amounts of pouring over movies and books and playing with perspective in my head. Sometimes it makes me more understanding and empathetic to others than NTs (so they tell me). I am also much more non-judgmental about "different" or "weird" people.

I remember reading about "Theory of Mind." The test for it is as follows. Someone is sent outside the room. The person being tested stays in the testing room. In the testing room, the examiner fills up an M&M box with paper clips. On the outside of the box, it says "M&M"s but there are paperclips on the inside. Then the examiner asks the test subject, "What will the person outside the room say is in the box?" If the person being tested doesn't possess "Theory of Mind," they will say "paper clips." That's because they don't know how someone thinks differently. They know that there are paper clips inside the box, so that's how the other person should think. If they do possess "Theory of Mind" skills, they will know that all the person sees is the outside of the box and therefore they will think that M&M's are in the box. (For British and Commonwealth countries, I believe M&Ms are almost the same thing as smarties. In the US, smarties are a different type of candy. They have a page on Facebook.)

I read an article about NT child development. The average NT brain doesn't develop this skill until about the age of 2. My relative actually did develop Theory of Mind after intensive behavioral intervention at a young age.

I was very literal and concrete when I was young. I believed all of the commercials on TV. That's why I don't think children should be subject to those slick marketing and advertising types. Children believe what they see.

I remember learning that a "kid" was actually the name for a goat. I thought that was really funny to me. I also remember reading a book. The writer kept on writing the phrase, "he lost his head." I imagined that this man's head was constantly falling to the ground. When I got older, I realized that the phrase "lost his head" was a way of saying that he was angry.