Studying humans

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I do enjoy the little social interactions that other people do (when I'm not involved). I don't understand why I have so much trouble in social interactions when I study people. I like studying humans as you would study gorillas. I mean researchers hang out with say kangaroos and recognise what they do, what their behaviour means and I do the same with humans. Animals don't speak and are therefore entirely non-verbal.
I'm not all that into animals. I like individual animals and they don't seem upset with me but the entire animal obsession I don't get. I mean humans are animals.
Maybe it's my cultural background. I've travelled a bit in my life and see things change in different countries and people insistent that what they know is the truth and get very angry when you say otherwise. Like how on one continent, it was viewed that women were the ones always chatting and men were practical and get on with stuff and on another continent, it was viewed entirely the other way around: men chatting while it is women who get on with stuff.
Personally, I think it's the women who get on with stuff. (gentle teasing)The UN seems to think so and in many developmental strategies, they try to hand more money over to the women

So, with my very probably Aspie ex, we sometimes went to bars (not loud ones, gentle jazzy places with comfy chairs and shady corners) or wherever and just chatted. We enjoy food and trying new beers and stuff and it was good because it was just the two of us with no social pressure. I liked watching people and introduced him to the joys of watching people communicate subverbally. Although I have to say it's always about sex and generally a mating dance. When it comes to me and what they want, can't figure it out. It's puzzling, I watch people enough I should be able to pick up on stuff and not get them pissed off like for example with my housemates currently. So maybe I can see how NTs may relate to other NTs. Maybe I only see people from the side with general body movements and not face to face.

I'm an observer not a participant and can't get my observer experience into my participant experience. Any comments as to why?

you might like a book by dr. oliver sacks entitled "an anthropologist on mars." btw, welcome to WP

sorry am not able to add to the point behind the topic but have picked up on this which is a very common misbelief;

animals do speak,they just dont speak traditional human language-they speak cat,rat,horse,chicken etc.


seconding that.

There are plenty of people who study humans. like Gorillas. People who study humans in their natural environment (like Jane Goodall and her chimps) are called anthropologists. People study how humans respond to stimuli in a clinical environment (like scientists who watch gorillas eating different food in a cage) are called psychologists. Finally there are people who probe and poke humans in hospitals (like Vets probing and poking a gorilla in an animal hospital) are called medical researchers.



Animals are perceived as cognitively inferior to humans because of the size of their brains. Scientists know that in the future elephants and dolphins (despite not having an opposable thumb) could be proven to be much smarter than us. Most animals have some form of language, even simple insects are verbal and communicate with one another.

Ah ha. Yes, I understand the problem, because I have been using the same strategies.

The problem is that ethological techniques only work so far with humans, and are probably inadequate for understanding the social behaviour of nonhumans.

Here is your first problem. While many nonhuman animals are social (the Canis genus, for example) eusociality, such as is found in Homo, is extremely rare and only found in one other mammal clade (a couple of Bathyergidae, and even that is arguable).

In other words, human social behaviour is not going to be adequately comprehensible using common ethological tools.

This means that ethological investigation techniques, especially used as an amateur, will only get you so far. You also run extreme risk of the external observation techniques that you have to use in public spaces, being perceived as "creepy" (there is probably less risk of this if you are female, but it would still be an issue to some degree). My efforts in applying observations learned through ethological techniques have not so much failed as often got me into trouble. For instance, the flirting behaviour used by the humans is especially problematic. One member of their species told me recently, for example, that friendly humans will often use flirt signals as a means of friendship bonding without implying that they wish to mate, and that many of these signals are actually extremely subtle, so it can be very difficult to distinguish the two in field observation, never mind apply them consistently and safely in participant interactions.

In order to develop the necessary rules I suspect you probably need to use the techniques used in anthropology. This writer has some useful thoughts on the subject, but I'm not sure yet how to implement them (especially in the face of a growing social anxiety problem): http://theautismanthropologist.wordpress.com/ More reading may be required.

I would also dispute the notion that nonhumans are nonverbal. Even some species of birds have a basic vocabulary ("flying predator"; "running predator"; "there is food"; "my territory"; "it is safe now", and so on). To what extent they have grammar is a more complicated question but we were wrong about them being nonverbal, so I want to rule nothing out. It may be that to develop our understanding of the social lives of nonhumans we will need to use the tools of anthropology, but that is a supposition on my part.

If you lived locally it would be fascinating to compare notes in one of their social environments, because this is one I'm having a lot of trouble with!

HTH

Last edited by Niall on 12 Feb 2014, 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Where are you getting this from? Why would you say that? Porpoise brains have larger proportional 'social' areas than human brains.
How could you know what another species' socialness truly is if you aren't one of them?

I'm not talking about social behavior. I'm talking about a particular type of social behaviour, characterised by "cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups." This is observable. For example, porpoises and many other primates exhibit some of these traits, but not all of them. Among mammals, this is limited to humans and some but not all species of mole rats. There is debate among scientists as to whether any mammals actually meet this standard: to what extent For example, do humans meet the co-operative brood care requirement (I would argue that schools allow Humans to meet this criterion) or the division of labour criterion (working and non-working parents create debate here)?

The point is that our sociality differs from that of most other species. I'm not arguing that porpoises are not social. I'm not arguing that their sociality is in some way inferior* (it works!), although you will see that implied in the literature, as if these forms of sociality exist on some form of hierarchy, merely that it's different, and the tools used to understand it may need to be more complex in order to understand the subtleties involved.

*I would say it's highly likely not only that they have some form of language (observed!) but use sophisticated nonverbal signalling. That signalling will not be picked up using conventional ethological techniques - i.e., you can't just watch them, but you need to understand context as well!

That said, and I did mention this, it may be that our prior assumptions about nonhuman sociality may have been inadequate. If so, our inadequate assumptions may have led to inadequate tools. Either way, those tools won't work adequately when investigating Humans.

Since I have ASD, I simply don't have the capacity to study human social interactions, except for the most basic ones. I'd be surprised if anyone with ASD could do this well.

there are some [purportedly] very high functioning aspies on this site who purport to do so on a regular basis.

The theory is that you can spend enough time observing them that you can mimic their behaviour well enough to pass as one of them.

I've spent too many years intermittently working on it. I still can't get it right. The problem, going back to what I think is the purpose of this discussion, is that I was trying to use the wrong observational tools for the job, and it might have been more effective had I studied anthropology instead.

As it stands, I've turned into an anxious, depressed, near-recluse!

It also raises the question of the amount of adaptation we should be making to them. I mean, I wouldn't expect one of my gay acquaintances to try to pass as heterosexual, for instance, and fail to see why I should not have the courtesy returned, but this is a whole separate thread.

Mimicry of action is analogous to echolalia. It does not give insight into human interaction, which is analogous to syntax. (We may some patterns, but we miss nuance and flow of interpersonal communication.)

live long enough and eventually you will see the emotional meanings of things.

It's much easier to observe something than to incorporate it into your experiences, as that requires practice. It's like learning the formulas of math, but not knowing how to apply them when it comes to the exam. Trial and error is likely the only way that you'll be able to develop better (even if fake) social skills. It's painful, and you won't end up with social skills as proficient as an NT but you will see improvement.

As part of one of my kinder videos, the teacher was instructing everyone to do a dance. If you watched the video, you'd see me looking depressed/confused and staring/glancing around the room. I literally looked lost, like I didn't know what was going on. Every other child looked happy, was talking, seemed lively etc. Once people started moving for the dance, I seemed to lag behind everyone because I'd never make a move by myself, I'd always look at others and then attempt to copy what they had done. Even so, my moves were sluggish, incomplete and basically without energy/enthusiasm.

That's only one example that I've pulled (to keep it short), but I'm just curious as to whether or not that's what you mean by mimicry being analogous to echolalia, or whether you meant something else.

Maybe the difficulty is in your real-time processing function? When life is happening to you, its hard to observe effectively while simultaneously determining meaning, evaluating potential responses and ultimately deciding on one before the appropriate moment slips past. It might help bridge the observer/participant gap to start journaling about your personal interactions soon after they happen. That could allow you to pin down the details you may have seen but not noticed in real-time, which would give you time to analyze them from a detached perspective. Essentially, you'd be showing your brain what you missed, where to look next time and possible responses if a similar situation crops up again.

When I was in high school, I was utterly clueless. My mom would sit down with me at night and have me tell her everything I could remember about my day. Then she'd help me to analyze it and interpret gestures, tones and context. It helped me enormously and I soon found myself better able to respond in real time because I'd trained my brain how to pick up the immediate short hand clues.

I know it's directed at the OP, but I actually couldn't agree more. It describes many of my relevant struggles precisely. Perhaps it also describes why people with Asperger's are often said to have a poor sense of time/direction, as in real-time it's far different to what they expect. I don't know.

Unspecific example, but I often think/know afterwards what I should have and could have done, but in the moment it would have seemed impossible. It's as if there are a bunch of factors I don't take in when I imagine scenarios.

I catch the big stuff, auntblabby, but the subtle things not so much.