Awkward

by Ty Tashiro

  I knew that my best bet to figure out social life was to turn the strength of my methodical nature on my social struggles. So I began my quest for social proficiency by establishing a routine and making lists. I set aside a half hour every school night before bedtime to think through my social interactions from the day and to make a list of the skills I needed to work on the following day. It was a humbling and contrived attempt to figure out social life, but eventually I began to see some progress. I also resolved to aspire to something more than just being less awkward, I wanted to become socially fluent, and I knew that I would be on my way when I started to dream about things besides baseball statistics and all-star wrestling.

  3

  LOOKING FOR SOME SWEET SKILLS

  I pressed the button to illuminate the face of my calculator watch. The time read 20:30:01. We were now more than halfway through the Winter Wonderland dance at Longs Peak Junior High and not a single soul had traversed the vast sea of linoleum floor that separated the girls on one side of the cafeteria and the boys on the other. Weeks ahead of the Winter Wonderland, students had been abuzz about who they would approach for a slow dance, but for the past ninety minutes the girls had stood in tight huddles on the north side of the cafeteria and the boys stood with their backs against the lime-green bricks of the south wall while trying their best to look aloof. Despite all of the hopeful energy leading up to the dance, we stood trapped on our gender-segregated sides, inhibited by an invisible force field of fear.

  All of that changed when the DJ laid down the first slow song of the night, Journey’s meandering ballad “Open Arms.” He turned down the lights, turned up the spotlight on the disco ball, and let loose a large plume of smoke into the middle of the dance floor. Those first few delicate notes of “Open Arms” triggered something in the mind of Kellie Kimpton, who was a consensus top-five hot girl at Longs Peak. She was the kind of girl most boys dreamed of dating and most girls wanted to be like. So everyone noticed when Kellie abruptly pivoted away from her huddle of girls on the north side and turned her bright green eyes south.

  Kellie’s squad of hot girls broke their huddle, fanned out into a wedge with military-like precision, and began their march south. Boys who had previously puffed their chests about their audacious plans for wooing girls onto the dance floor now stood with their backbones pressed tightly against the green brick wall. As Kellie’s crew broke through the cloud of smoke in the middle of the dance floor, an acute panic spread among the boys around me when they realized that the formation was headed right at them. I failed to use the girls’ trajectory to anticipate the impending social interaction and I was immune to the emotional contagion spreading like wildfire among the other boys. So I was particularly alarmed when Kellie grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor.

  As a socially awkward eighth-grade boy, my mind was ill equipped to detect flirtatious cues, much less understand that someone might be romantically interested in me. As a socially fluent girl, Kellie had deduced weeks ago that she would need to ask me to dance because her flirtations had lost all subtlety and I had shown no signs of having a clue. Kellie and I knew each other from Spanish II, where we were randomly assigned to sit together at a double desk. I found it easy to interact with her while we worked collaboratively on structured activities like dialogues about ordering at a restaurant or buying a train ticket.

  She was so far out of my league in the junior high social hierarchy that I had never considered that she would be interested in anything besides being amigos. During the weeks leading up to the Winter Wonderland dance, Kellie began calling me almost nightly on my parents’ landline under the pretense of needing help with her Spanish. As our study sessions veered from Spanish-related content, I never thought much about what she meant when she said, “I really hope I can date a guy as nice as you,” or “Some girl would be really lucky to have you as her boyfriend.”

  The problem with decoding mutual romantic interest is that the messages are intentionally encrypted. When mutual interest is unclear, people float the occasional compliment about someone’s appearance or brush someone’s knee with their hand, but these forays into flirtatious territory are often followed by retreats to more platonic behaviors. This erratic push-pull method of flirtation can be exhilarating for many people, but this approach dilutes the social signals to a point of imperceptibility for awkward people. The awkward have significant difficulty detecting obvious social cues, much less the kinds of subtle cues that are supposed to convey romantic interest.

  I was predictably disoriented by my first slow dance. Kellie rested her hands on my shoulders, and for two seconds that felt like an awkward eternity, I stood with my hands immobilized by my sides before I remembered that they went on her hips. For someone with social-processing limitations, dancing with Kellie Kimpton was a lot to handle. Journey was crooning about two people on the precipice of falling in love, the bright blue sparkles from the disco ball looked like glitter spinning around us, and the DJ had found new life now that people were dancing, and he kept unleashing clouds of smoke that irritated my overly sensitive tear ducts.

  Kellie moved closer. Her face was two inches from my face and she was now egregiously violating the conventional eighteen inches of distance. She smelled like a field of strawberries. We were the same height, which resulted in my realization that my eyeballs had never been this close to a girl’s eyeballs. I noticed through the periphery of my large square glasses that Kellie and her crew had broken the force fields of trepidation on both sides of the cafeteria. Liberated students nervously waddled around in pairs, their arms fully extended with their hands lightly resting on shoulders and hips. Most of them hoped to avoid too much eye contact and so they occasionally shifted their attention to my underdog story that was unfolding in real time.

  As Kellie and I slowly waddled in the blue spotlights on the dance floor, I noticed that some of the other boys and girls were making rapid circular motions with their hands. After a moment of confusion, I realized that they were trying to tell me that I should hurry up and go for the kiss. I knew they were right, but if I had inaccurately read Kellie’s social cues I would certainly look foolish, and even worse, I risked the emotional cataclysm that befalls twelve-year-old boys who get their hearts broken.

  As I heard “Open Arms” arch into the triumphant third verse, Kellie moved her hands from my shoulders to the middle of my back and leaned the top of her forehead on the middle of my forehead. I felt like Steve Perry was singing to me, crooning that he knew what it’s like to long for a girl. All I had to do for this to become “totally awesome” was broach the remaining 1.5 inches between our lips.

  Then, precisely as my courage peaked, Kellie pulled closer to my left ear and softly whispered something that sent my mind scrambling to figure out what she meant: “I’ve never felt this way about a friend before . . .”

  This Is Your Brain on Awkwardness

  AWKWARD PEOPLE SOMETIMES feel like the social features of their brain are like the light-speed function on the Millennium Falcon. In the original Star Wars trilogy, most scenes with the Millennium Falcon involve the co-pilots Han Solo and Chewbacca under attack by enemy spacecraft. They are always outnumbered and eventually escape becomes a necessary course of action. Solo orders Chewbacca to prepare for light speed, which causes audiences to hold their breath because they know there is a fifty-fifty chance the light speed will malfunction. When the light speed fails to engage, there is an anticlimactic sound as the engines sputter and their desperate circumstance is punctuated by Chewbacca’s exasperated roar.

  After socially fluent people commit an awkward act, it’s natural for them to wonder why they didn’t make better decisions in a situation they usually handle with grace. But for chronically awkward people, their string of ongoing awkward acts can lead them to wonder whether there is something fundamentally different about how their minds handle social situations. There is now an emerging area of neuroscience research that provides some clues about
how the awkward brain works.

  Matthew Lieberman is a professor of neuroscience at UCLA who provides a fascinating overview of how our brains handle social information in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Lieberman’s lab and others have found that people have two separate brain networks, one for nonsocial problems and another for social problems. When people recruit their Vulcan-like reason or logic to solve a nonsocial problem such as reading a passage about neuroscience, a network of brain regions become active that I’ll colloquially refer to as your book smarts. Conversely, when people solve social problems such as trying to empathize with a friend’s situation or figure out whether someone is romantically interested in him or her, they activate a different network of brain regions neuroscientists call the social brain. Here’s the catch. When our book smarts activate, our social brain becomes less active and conversely, when our social brain activates, our book smarts become less active.

  This distinction that Lieberman makes between social and nonsocial problem solving is important because new brain-imaging studies have shown that awkward people show irregular patterns of brain activity when they process social information. Whether it’s making sense of another person’s intent or deciphering someone else’s emotional state, awkward people tend to show less activity in social brain networks and they sometimes show hyperactivity in networks that are typically associated with book smarts.

  These findings suggest that awkward people may not intuitively see social patterns or infer broad meaning, but instead have to assemble social information as if they are solving an equation or piecing together a puzzle. For example, when you read “Kellie” in the preceding pages you probably did not have to sound out the individual letters like they would on Sesame Street. Being a fluent reader, you intuitively processed “Kellie” not as six individual letters, but as a single word, and you did it in a split second without conscious awareness.

  But what if the word looked like this: Kel$li@e?

  All of the essential information is included for you to read the word, but the two extraneous symbols likely stopped you from automatically recognizing it, which made your processing slower and more deliberate. That’s similar to what it feels like for awkward people, who do not intuitively recognize the general meaning from social cues, but instead see social situations as fragments and brain scans suggest that they are scrambling to assemble those fragments into a coherent whole.

  Instead of an awkward boy understanding a situation as a “slow dance,” he sees the situation in the component parts, “a song, hands on hips, left foot, then right foot, eye contact . . .” For awkward people, relatively straightforward situations can grow exponentially complex in their minds.

  Fortunately, there is also evidence to suggest that these difficulties can be overcome with some tweaks. We will see that awkward people can decipher the components of social situations as well as socially fluent people when they are reminded to be deliberate about looking for essential cues and have a little more time to process what those cues mean. The skills needed to make sense of social situations are not only about understanding what other people say, but also grasping the nuances about how they said something. I’ll review three important cues that tend to give awkward individuals trouble: nonverbal behaviors, facial expressions, and decoding language used during social conversations.

  Get a Cue

  THE GUYS STANDING next to me at the Winter Wonderland dance had anticipated the likely social interaction with Kellie and her crew. While the boys around me were mentally preparing for a potential social interaction, my mind was still calculating the proportion of time elapsed to time remaining at the dance. It’s as if my mind wandered far from the common sense I would need to navigate the impending social situation.

  When Kellie grabbed my hand to pull me onto the dance floor, my mind rushed to reallocate my mental resources to this unexpected social opportunity.

  There were a number of nonverbal cues the other boys intuitively picked up as the DJ started the first slow song of the night. Kellie’s decisive turn toward the south wall, her group’s coordinated trajectory across the dance floor, and their unbroken eye contact were all obvious signs that interaction was imminent. As with many social situations, I noticed some of the same cues other people saw, but my mind did not intuitively convert the cues into a useful conclusion. There are now a number of psychological studies that can help us understand which cues are essential to decoding social interactions and why awkward people might miss some of these cues.

  Judith Hall at Northeastern University and Marianne Schmid Mast at the University of Neuchatel investigated how nonverbal behaviors affect people’s ability to accurately identify what someone else might think or feel, which is what psychologists call empathic accuracy. They asked research participants to watch a video of two people interacting and then asked observers to identify what each person in the video was thinking or feeling at sixteen different points in the video. Hall and Mast then compared the observers’ guesses to what the two people conversing in the video reported actually thinking and feeling at those points.

  The twist was that Hall and Mast varied how much information each observer would have by randomly assigning them to one of four conditions: audio only, reading a transcript of the audio, video only, or audio and video combined. As expected, observers in the audio plus video condition achieved the highest rate of empathic accuracy (56 percent). Observers in the audio condition were more accurate (50 percent) than participants in the transcript condition (40 percent). What is somewhat surprising is that viewers in the silent video condition, who had to rely on nonverbal cues, were able to guess the discussants’ emotions at a rate far better than chance (34 percent).

  Brooke Ingersol at Michigan State University investigated whether participants who scored high on a measure of awkward characteristics would have more trouble interpreting nonverbal cues compared to non-awkward individuals. For example, awkward individuals were less likely to see rapid head nods as a signal that they should finish speaking. They were also more likely to think that it’s all right to gaze more at strangers while physically close to them. Although awkward people do not intend to talk longer than others prefer and hope to avoid making others uncomfortable on a crowded elevator, their misinterpretation of nonverbal cues not only inhibits their ability to accurately read social situations, but can also send the wrong message.

  Whether it’s a gaze averted, a twinkle in someone’s eye, or a head nod, we rely heavily on nonverbal cues to effectively interpret what others are telling us and to communicate our own intentions or feelings. What we will see next is that awkward people miss nonverbal cues that are obvious to others because they are prone to directing their attention away from the nonverbal cues that sit center stage.

  NONVERBAL BEHAVIORS DURING CONVERSATIONS

  In an ongoing conversation, the cues people use to evaluate others’ likability are not so much about what you say, but rather how much they feel that you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. The following list comes from a meta-analysis that looked at which nonverbal cues during conversations were most strongly related to making a positive impression.

  1.Body squared to partner and a forward lean

  2.Smiling

  3.Head nodding

  Can You Really “See It in Their Eyes”?

  WHEN KELLIE AND I first stepped onto the dance floor, I awkwardly set my hands on her waist while she firmly gripped my shoulders with both hands. Her eyes looked straight ahead toward mine, and I felt as if they were radiating invisible rays that quickly began to overheat my social brain. I was not used to looking people directly in the eye.

  Kellie appeared straight-faced. Her mouth was neither upturned nor downturned, her brow neither rose nor fell, which only left her eyes as a cue. They were wide and her pupils dilated, which gave me a sense that she was either surprised or scared or some combination of both. After a few seconds of this intense eye contact, I felt overw
helmed by the intensity. Like a spring-loaded mechanism returning something to its resting position, my gaze rotated slightly to the left, where it settled on the sparkles from Kellie’s earrings. I felt like I had come up for air.

  If you have to pick one place to look for important social cues, then look at someone’s face. Legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead observed that facial expressions are one of the human traits that is universal. Cultural differences can shift the meaning of some facial expressions, but in general a smile means good things and a scowl means bad things across cultures. We rely heavily on the rich cues from facial expressions to recognize if someone is a friend rather than a foe and to decipher other people’s emotional state and intent.

  Paul Ekman is a professor emeritus from the University of California at San Francisco who has found that facial expressions are reliable signals of one’s true emotional state. He has found that micro-expressions made by the eyes, lips, and other parts of the face can be reliably integrated into signals for various facial expressions. For example, a smile with accompanied creases along the sides of the eyes is a true smile whereas a smile with no crease along the sides of the eyes is a dead giveaway for a fake smile. Conversely, a furrowed brow, intense gaze, and narrowed lips are indicative of someone who feels angry.

  Of course, people do not go through life freezing their facial expressions for micro-expression analysis. When socially fluent people enter a social situation, their instinct is to look first at people’s faces. From a quick glance, socially fluent people recognize whether the mood of the other people in the room is somber, elated, or nervous.

  There are at least two explanations for why awkward people have a harder time using facial cues to detect emotions. Ralph Adolphs and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology conducted a clever study comparing which facial features awkward versus non-awkward study participants would use to judge emotions. As in most studies of emotion recognition, they found that non-awkward participants relied heavily on the eye region of the face to detect emotion. By comparison, awkward participants devoted far less attention to the eye region and instead looked more to the mouth region.