Social Skills: Managing Relationships Well

Some people go unnoticed at a party and yet are the ones best able to calm an argument between two friends. Social skills have little to do with being the life of the party and a lot to do with knowing what to do in each exchange.

In Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence model (1995), social skills are the component that turns self-awareness and empathy into relationships that work: communicating clearly, resolving disagreements without breaking the bond and building trust. If empathy is understanding others, social skills are knowing how to act well with them.

What they are, according to psychology

Clinical psychology was studying them long before Goleman. In the Spanish-speaking world, the classic reference is psychologist Vicente Caballo, whose 1993 handbook is the basis for our social skills test. In his account, social skills are concrete, learnable behaviors through which a person expresses feelings, opinions, wishes or rights in a way that suits the situation, respecting those same behaviors in others, and solving the problem at hand without creating new ones.

That definition has two useful consequences:

• They are behaviors, not a trait. You can describe what a skilled person does in a specific situation, and that can be observed and practiced.
• They depend on context. What fits a family dinner is not the same as what fits a work meeting, and part of the skill lies in noticing the difference.

The behaviors usually included are starting and ending conversations, giving and receiving compliments, saying no, asking another person to change a behavior, expressing disagreement and handling criticism.

Riggio’s six pieces: expressing, reading and controlling

From social psychology, Ronald Riggio proposed in 1986 a model that is still widely cited, the Social Skills Inventory (SSI). It organizes the skills into three basic abilities that apply to two domains, the emotional and the social:

Ability	Emotional	Social
Expressing	Conveying clearly what you feel, through voice and gesture	Speaking fluently and drawing others into a conversation
Reading	Reading other people’s emotions	Understanding the unwritten rules of each situation
Controlling	Regulating how you express your own emotions	Adapting your role to the situation, with poise

The table helps explain why someone can be very skilled in one domain and less so in another. One person may express emotions vividly yet have little control over them in an argument; another may handle a formal meeting with poise and feel clumsy talking about feelings. Riggio stressed that what matters is the balance between the pieces: lots of expressiveness without control, or lots of control without sensitivity, works worse than a more even profile.

Not the same as being extraverted

Extraversion is a temperament trait: it describes how much someone enjoys social stimulation and how much energy it gives them. Social skills describe how well they handle exchanges.

The two are related, because people who seek out more social situations get more chances to practice, but they are different things. An introverted person can listen very attentively, choose their words well at a delicate moment and be the one everyone calls when there is a problem. And a very extraverted person can talk to everyone and still handle a disagreement badly.

Why they matter: relationships, well-being and health

The underlying reason psychology cares about social skills is their effect on relationships, and the effect of relationships on everything else.

• Well-being. In a sample of 703 adults aged 18 to 87, Chris Segrin and Melissa Taylor (2007) found that people with better social skills had greater psychological well-being, and that much of that link ran through something in between: they had more positive relationships with others. The skills do not bring well-being on their own; they bring it through the bonds they make possible.
• Health. A meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy Smith and Bradley Layton (2010), covering 148 studies and more than 300,000 participants, concluded that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period. The authors compared the size of that effect with well-known risk factors such as smoking.

These studies are correlational and measure relationships, not skills directly, so they do not allow anyone to say that learning to say no lengthens your life. What they do show is that the quality of our bonds weighs heavily, and that social skills are one of the pieces with the most influence on that quality. The widespread idea that 40% of happiness depends on what you do is discussed, along with its criticisms, in our article on personal motivation.

How they look day to day

Some examples of what separates a skilled response from a less skilled one in ordinary situations:

• Saying no. “I can’t take this on this week, my schedule is full; if it helps, I can look at it next week” versus agreeing and delivering late, or versus a curt “no” and nothing more.
• Expressing disagreement. “I see it differently, can I tell you why?” versus “that makes no sense.”
• Receiving criticism. Asking what exactly is expected before defending yourself, instead of justifying every point.
• Asking for a change. Describing the specific behavior and its effect (“when you arrive half an hour late, the meeting starts without you”) instead of judging the person (“you’re a mess”).

They all share one logic: saying what you think clearly and respectfully, without keeping quiet out of fear of conflict and without steamrolling. The literature calls this assertive communication, and it is the foundation of almost every training program.

They can be trained

Being behaviors rather than a fixed trait is what explains why social skills training has been one of the most widely used techniques in psychology since the 1970s, in clinical, educational and workplace settings alike. Programs usually combine the same elements: explaining the skill, seeing it modeled, rehearsing it in simulated situations, getting feedback and practicing it in real life.

Feedback plays a special role, because many social habits are blind spots: aspects of how we relate to people that others see clearly and we do not. Active listening, for example, gets an article of its own, because it is one of the skills most people believe they have mastered and fewest actually practice.

If you want to see how you handle situations such as saying no, expressing emotions or managing disagreement, you can take our social skills test, and to see them within your full profile, the emotional intelligence test.

Disclaimer: this article is for general information only and does not replace the assessment, diagnosis or intervention of a mental health professional.

Sources

• Caballo, V. E. (1993). Manual de evaluación y entrenamiento de las habilidades sociales. Siglo XXI.
• Riggio, R. E. (1986). Assessment of basic social skills. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(3), 649-660. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.3.649
• Segrin, C., and Taylor, M. (2007). Positive interpersonal relationships mediate the association between social skills and psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(4), 637-646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.01.017
• Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., and Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.