Anyone know why a person with a PhD is working at a fast-food place? If you think it is because they may not have very good social skills, you have maybe 20% of the answer. Actually, they may have some very reasonable social skills; however, like most topics connected to learning, the concept of social skills is just the tip of the iceberg. It is only in addressing the entire topic of social competence that we can save our children from the social isolation that so many experience throughout their lives.

In order to function appropriately within many environments, social competence, a complicated, multifaceted, demanding process that happens spontaneously for most of us, is a prerequisite to inclusion over time. In fact, social skills really must be broken down through task analysis to the smallest component to allow for error analysis and discrete re-teaching. In other words, by looking at the world the way they do we can get a perspective and understand how to teach them appropriately. Usually, when a child makes a mistake in math we analyze and reteach the academic skills. When that same child makes a mistake with social skills or social cognition, we discipline them for appearing rude and inconsiderate instead of teaching them because they lack a skill set or do not understand a concept.

Steps to Processing Social Information

1 Perceiving or Social Information Awareness –

 The operative word here is awareness. You cannot respond or begin to assign appropriate importance, attention, or relevance, to a situation if it is not recognized.

2  Encoding or Social Information Processing –

Learning to interpret and convert social information (inferring an emotional state of another with external factors) into knowledge for future use.

3      Learning or Social Skills

 Creating a repertoire of learned skills through experience, study, and imitative learning with much repetition.

4      Processing or Social Intelligence

Socially problem solve and manage individual relationships through the ability to judge, process, infer ToM, and predict social information.

Perform a series of social skills and follow established written and unwritten social rules to problem-solve or manage (to change or preserve) individual relationships.

5      Communicating or Social Competence

Use of inference, judgement, and accurate decision-making skills

Achieves pro individual and group social goals efficiently by being outcome oriented, effective, and fluent.

Ability to lead change, address social problems and prejudice, be persuasive, promote mental and physical health, and build pro-social networks required for community and working environments.

Goal directed exchanges of information