Social | Demo

Recently I spent a few weeks in California, partly for work but mostly intended for rest and relaxation and to celebrate my brother’s 50th birthday. Throughout life, one of my absolutely most favorite activities has been meeting new people. To me, the world is a massive library and each person is a charming book waiting to be encountered, selected, read, understood and shared. Everyone has a story to tell and a lesson to impart, if you’re willing to listen and unguarded enough to travel beyond the surface and sometimes superficial introductions.

I met many cool, complex, and kind people during this short trip, most of them leaving a unique lasting impression. But what I was greatly fascinated by was the way some special souls were like a breath of fresh air, having the ability to dance to the deepest aspects of our emotional and rational dimensions while others were like irritating intruders that were part of the environment, yet made no effort to connect or positively interact.

Being socially intelligent, or a master at Social Salsa as I like to call it, may be natural to some, but the good news is that the behaviors associated with leaving a likable impression can be identified, measured and learned — so it’s less about personality and more about a choice to put an effort into being a pleasant person that others enjoy being around and miss when absent.

So what are some of the traits of people who have a healthy level of self-awareness, ‘get’ others and dance into our hearts? Here are the most central Social Salsa steps:

• You may have just met them, but through their initial interaction, they give you the impression that you’ve known them for years because they’re open and engaging and share aspects of their life openly and without reservation.

• They aren’t afraid to initiate conversation.

• They don’t strike a pose in the corner, acting aloof and unapproachable.

• They’re as curious about you as you are about them.

• When in conversation, they listen with an open mind and heart, without interrupting.

• They remember details shared and will ask/follow up when you next see them.

• It’s not only about them — they give you a space to carve out and share who you are.

• They’re dependable and genuine.

• They’re secure and confident.

• They laugh with you, not at you.

• They may use sarcasms but in a witty way, not in a whipping way.

• They demonstrate compassion and empathy.

• They provide value to the group through their knowledge, experience or kindness.

• They are thorough, consistent and patient.

The study, conducted at the University of Chicago and published in the online journal Cortext, looked at 38 people who considered themselves “very lonely” and 32 people who didn’t identify as lonely.

From there, researchers conducted something called a Stroop Test, which asks participants to focus first on the color of a word’s lettering rather than its meaning. This allows the meaning or impact of the word to be subconscious. The words fell into four categories: social and positive ( like “party”), nonsocial and negative (like “solitary”), nonsocial and positive (like “joy”) and social and negative (like “sad”).

During this test, an electrode of 128 sensors was placed on the participants’ heads to measure their brain waves for 480 milliseconds. For the first 280 milliseconds, lonely people’s brains responded in the same way to negative and nonsocial words. But after that point, their brains activated in the neural areas devoted to attention when shown socially negative words, whereas non-lonely people responded to both social and non-social negative words for the full 480 milliseconds.

In other words, lonely people focused on the negative while non-lonely people focused on everything.

Although this was a small study and more research needs to be done, researchers Stephanie and John Cacioppo and Stephen Balogh concluded that this subtle difference actually shows that lonely people’s intense response to a social threat over half a second is probably implicit.