Social skills: showing, reading and adapting in conversations with others

Some people walk into a room of strangers and are talking to three of them within minutes, yet miss that one of them wanted to leave. Others hardly speak and still notice every change of mood around the table. Both are socially skilled, in different ways.

In 1986 the psychologist Ronald Riggio described social skill as a set of separate abilities and published the Social Skills Inventory to measure them. His model crosses three abilities (expressing, reading and controlling) with two channels: the emotional one, which is mostly nonverbal, and the social one, which is mostly verbal. That gives six skills.

What our test measures

Our social skills test covers four of Riggio's six skills. We wrote the 16 statements ourselves, based on his model, so this is a self-reflection tool, not his validated questionnaire. Each skill gets four statements, and you rate each one on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

• Emotional expressivity: how clearly your feelings show, for example "My emotions are easily visible on my face".
• Emotional sensitivity: how well you pick up what others feel, for example "I quickly notice when someone is sad or upset, even if they do not say so".
• Social expressivity: how easily you start and carry a conversation, for example "I find it easy to initiate conversations with strangers".
• Social control: how well you adjust to different people and roles, for example "I can adapt my communication style to different people and social contexts".

One statement in each skill is worded the other way, for example about often not knowing what to say in social situations, and is scored in reverse. Two parts of Riggio's model are missing from our version: emotional control (managing how much of your feeling shows) and social sensitivity (reading social rules and how others judge you).

Balance matters more than a single high score

Riggio treated these as skills that work together. In his model, strong expressivity with weak control can make a person seem impulsive or overwhelming, while strong control with little expressivity can make them seem cold or hard to read. So look at the shape of your four scores, not only at the highest one.

Others read you fast

In 1993 Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal showed people short silent video clips of teachers, some only a few seconds long. Ratings made from these clips predicted the evaluations the teachers received from their own students at the end of the semester. Gestures, facial expression and posture carry much of what people conclude about you, often before you say a word. That is what the emotional expressivity score is about.

The limit of rating yourself

Rating your own sensitivity is tricky, because the moments when you misread someone are exactly the ones you do not notice. In a 2009 review Judith Hall, Susan Andrzejewski and Jennelle Yopchick found that how good people think they are at reading others is only weakly related to how they do on tests of that skill. Treat your emotional sensitivity score as a description of how you see yourself. It can help to ask someone who knows you well to rate the same four statements about you and compare.

Because these are skills, they can be practised. If starting conversations is your low point, short low-stakes exchanges (a question to a colleague, a comment to a neighbour) build fluency. If reading others is the weak spot, a simple "How are you finding this?" gives you an answer you no longer have to guess.

If conversations feel hard because of fear more than lack of practice, the social anxiety test (Mini-SPIN) asks about that directly. To go further into reading other people's feelings, try the empathy test or read what emotional intelligence is.