Social Skills Training and How Culture Works Against It.

While I am a big fan of teaching social skills, and very much in need of them, there is a huge limitation to making these efforts widely effective that has to be recognized before learning can take hold

?“...Most of the behaviors that we label as social skills are not learned. rather most of these behaviors appear to be more an emergent property of our biological state than they are skills in social learning.” –Dr. Stephen Porges

The biological state Dr. Porges refers to is the state of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). At a given time, what is our Autonomic State? Which part of the ANS is activated, controlling our thoughts, reactions, and behaviors? Is it the Social Engagement System (SES), or the defensive Fight or Flight (FoF) System that inhibits the SES, or is it the older defensive Immobilization System that shuts down both the SES and the mobilizing FoF System.?

Over time, which Autonomic State is most commonly activated in society’s institutions? Top-down policies or training could work against improving social skills. It all depends on who is in what state.

“If events and contexts compromise our ability to recruit the neural circuit that supports safety and social interactions [SES], the interaction is going to be very challenging. So the ability to be engaging, expressive, and understanding is going to be limited. We can generalize to our entire culture and identify features that would interfere with access to the neural circuit supporting social engagement. Remember that our culture is not structured to promote personal safety. It is a culture that unambiguously states that we can't work hard enough, be successful enough, accumulate enough, and everything is vulnerable. So the culture is really telling us that we live in a dangerous place and during dangerous times [which continually trigger either FoF or Immobilization behaviors and block SES behaviors]. I always wonder what humanity would be like if we were more respectful of humanity's need for safety.”

Building on innate, emergent social skills is a bottom-up process, and the bottom is our neurobiology. Culturally, it is side-by-side.