2.2 What is subtle about social interaction?  (Page 14/26)

Persistent themes in interpersonal relations: authority, subordinacy, and equality

The nature of interpersonal skills

• the extent to which he or she can communicate with others, in a manner that fulfils one's rights, requirements, satisfactions, or obligations to a reasonable degree without damaging the other person's similar rights, requirements, factions, or obligations, and hopefully shares these rights etc. with others in free and open exchange.

This next quote from Robbins and Hunsaker Robbins, S. and Hunsaker, P. (1996) Training in interpersonal skills: tips for managing people at work (2nd edn), New Jersey: Prentice Hall. is rather obvious, in order to get better at socializing and learning social skills you need to practice:

• To become competent at any skill, a person needs to understand it both conceptually and behaviorally; have opportunities to practice it; get feedback on how well he or she is performing the skill; and use the skill often enough so that it becomes integrated with his or her behavioral repertoire.

The goals we pursue are not always conscious, and indeed one feature of skilled performance is that behaviour is often executed automatically. Once responses are learned they tend to become hard-wired or habitual. When we know how to drive, we no longer have to think about actions such as how to start the car, brake, reverse, and so on. Yet, when learning to drive, these actions are consciously monitored as they are performed. In the successful learning of new skills we move through the stages of conscious incompetence (we know what we should be doing and we know we are not doing it very well), conscious competence (we know we are performing at a satisfactory level), and finally unconscious competence (we just do it without thinking about it and we succeed). This is also true of interpersonal skills. During free-flowing social encounters, less than 200 milliseconds typically elapse between the responses of speakers and rarely do conversational pauses reach three seconds. As a result certain elements, such as the exact choice of words used and the use of gestures, almost always occur without conscious reflection. In relation to the negotiation context, McRae McRae, B. (1998) Negotiating and influencing skills, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. explained how: 'Expert negotiators become so proficient at certain skills in the negotiating process that they do not have to consciously think about using these skills. It's as if the response becomes second nature.' However, an awareness of relevant goals does not ensure success. As expressed by J. Greene Greene, J. (2000) 'Evanescent mentation: an ameliorative conceptual foundation for research and theory on message production', Communication Theory 10: 139-55. :