Social Mistake?

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Asking an acquaintance/friend if they are coming to a mutual acquaintance/friend's birthday party without knowing if they were invited or not?

I thought about it, concluded it was a social mistake, then later I ended up asking it anyway. Story of my life. lol

I have done the same thing on several occasions. I must just assume that everyone I am friends with, everyone else is friends with too. Under the same assumption, I make the mistake of assuming everyone likes each other and that there are no social cliques. Having said this, it doesn't bother me at all. Part and parcel of being socially awkward.

i dont really see how that is a social mistake, if it is a mutual friend, it is not strange to assume he is also invited, unless the party is going to be for a very select few people.

I do that a lot, too, presumign everyone likes and even knows everyone else can be a problem. But, I often go the other extreme then, too. Someone on Facebook wondered why someone didn't come to a funeral after later seeing them and the person offered condolences. Not realizing it might have been a rhetorical question (I'm famous for not picking those up ) I posted 5-6 reasons in response. (Sickness, started to go but car broke down, out of town, I forget the others.)

The person did say it made her feel better that I did that, so I guess it was okay.

As to yours, I don't think it's a social mistake unless you know, as above, it's for a small number or something. I think it's more the case that we need information we don't have, and it's normal to seek such information. Most people understand that not everyone has all data and will just accept it. It's actually, to me, one of those pieces of small talk where - as I note in another post - it's a little better if you provide a lot more data than usual, even it's actually normal communication pattern in such small talk to go, "Are you going to x's party?" "No, I wasn't invited/wasn't aware of it." Oh, sorry." "That's okay."

I wouldn't call that a social mistake at all. I've seen all kind of people do that. Besides people tend to only invite other from certain circles to their parties, the main groups they socialise with, and quite often others they know like work, or people from other hobby groups are not included - but that doesn't mean they hold anything against the people they don't invite, and I suspect if one such person 'asked' if they could come along - although this may be bad social etiquette, they would quite likely get a yes.

People often just assume certain others aren't interested.

Yeah, it's a pretty big party (like 25 people invited), and I thought the person I asked was better friends with the inviter than I was. That's why I felt awkward asking.

I was just extrapolating from the rule that it's rude to ask people where they work in this economy (they might not have a job), rude to ask other law students "what are you doing this summer?" (a good proportion of law students can't even find work during the summers).

Could this be one of the reasons why I'm avoidant -- because I turn things into social mistakes that may not be?

Quite possibly yes. People are far more tolerant of social mistakes than you realise, they're more concerned about their own social mistakes than yours!