Any studies on aspies with strong social skills?

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There is more and more evidence that what you refer to (at least for many CEOs, top managers and politicians) does not only require social skills but even more so psychopathic traits:

- Babiak P., Hare R., Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work, Harper Business, 2006.
- Long S., The perverse organisation and its deadly sins, Karnac Books , 2008.
- Long S., Socioanalytic methods – Discovering the hidden in organisations and social systems, Routledge, 2013.

The following research shows that the capitalist economic game (just considering talent and capital, in the absence of psychopathic social gaming between agents) is a game of luck. This means whoever rises to the top in the social ranks is likely someone with very little empathy:

- Pluchino A., Biondoy A. E., Rapisardaz A., Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure, arXiv:1802.07068v2 [physics.soc-ph], February 2018.

@cyberdad - That's interesting, I feel like I'm really finally catching my stride in my 30's myself. I don't have to put myself through years of awful social situations and relationships to improve my skills anymore, like I went through in my teens, and to a progressively lesser extent through my 20's. Also interesting that both you and Nightingale learned a lot from movies; I watched very few movies until I was in college and more as adult (thanks Netflix). I did learn a lot of critical skills through pick-up artist resources and through reading about developmental psychology, psychotherapy, and a variety of other topics of human behavior. Also from reading/studying economics and business, this helped me get my head around the competitive/posturing side of socializing. I guess if our minds don't learn these skills directly from socializing, we have to rely on other resources, ones that we can take our time and study more deeply. I wonder what other resources people have found success from?

Also, I disagree that the ability to "assimilate in a crowd" indicates "average (or below) social skills". Imagine a neurotypical that could regularly blend in with a crowd of aspies/auties? That takes some good skills, and to do it in a variety of situations requires a much better-than-average understanding of human behavior and of a foreign neurotype. Although I'd agree that a CEO of a big company needs to be excellent at such skills (and lots of other jobs require them as well), the average NT does not have these skills, even if they are socially competent with other NTs.

And really, let's face it, "average" NTs are only socially competent in groups of other NTs when they are from the same or very similar cultures.

What you're doing is actually to "assimilate seamlessly into a crowd of where you are a lone minority". That's hard.

Probably yes, but they just don't need to do that. We have the society that we have, and we have to succeed in this society and not another. It takes us more effort and knowledge - but we still achieve worse results than NTs.


I always find it much easier to deal with people from very distant cultures rather than my own. Most likely because they see that I'm an alien and don't expect me to follow their social rituals perfectly. That's why I love traveling.