Why scripts don’t work in real life.

When people are teaching social skills to autistic people (usually children) there is often an emphasis on scripts. You know what I mean. A pre rehearsed exchange of words between 2 people you can follow like a flow chart. For example at a shop.

A: I would like to buy X.

B: thankyou that costs 3£.

A: I would like to pay by card.

B: Please tap your card here.

These scripts work well for scenarios with a limited number of options. Primarily transactional exchanges where A and B have fairly set and well defined expectations they are willing to communicate clearly. But there are lots of complex social interactions that are not transactional. People deliberately try to keep where they stand vague in order to try and gain some sort of advantage (or avoid disadvantage). People deflect, answer questions with questions and provide vague non answers. These sorts of exchanges are not transactional. They are in a sense manipulative and 3 examples spring to mind. A police man attempting to get incriminating information out of a suspect. A job interviewer attempting to get the best candidate at the lowest wage without putting him off. And a girl cruising bars looking to meet men.

What’s the first thing a policeman tends to say when he pulls someone over? ‘Do you know why I stopped you?’ He’s deliberately creating ambiguity in the hopes that he will get information out of you that he can use against you. The police may deliberately try and give you the impression they know less than they do or they know more than they do in the hopes of trapping you in a lie or getting you to blurt out information that could incriminate you. And do you know how lawyers deal with this? What a good lawyer will do was basically turn a police interview back into a script. They will pre-agree a statement with you’ve mentioned everything that might be important in your defense if they take things to court, they’ll have you read that statement at the police interview and then they’ll have you answer no comment to any follow-up questions.

The same sort of thing happens at a job interview. The interviewer wants the best possible candidate for the lowest possible price. So will create as much ambiguity as possible about what the job entails in case any aspect of it might put you off well trying to get as much information as possible out of view about what your skills are and what sort of wage and working conditions you would be willing to accept.

This is why job adverts sometimes emphasize the exciting and interesting part of a job and you turn up at the interview and then discover that it’s only a very small component of the job and  most of the job is actually much more mundane activity. I ask you loads of questions like why do you want the job and where do you see yourself in five years time. They want to know if you’ll go along with the corporate role they’ve mapped out for you without revealing exactly what that plan is.

The same could be said for a girl at a bar looking to meet men. Since most women won’t approach men she has a vested interest in deciding as quickly as possible whether you fit her criteria and then if you don’t getting rid of you as quietly and quickly as possible. And on top of that she’s trying to do it in a way that doesn’t really reveal what her agenda is because she believes you will try to deceive her if you figure her out.

Every minute you are talking to her is a minute she cannot be approached by somebody else so she doesn’t want to show any sign of whether she is interested in you until she’s determined for sure that she’s interested enough because if she does you might stick around a long time after she’s decided she wants you gone blocking her from interacting with other men.

Assuming she likes you physically she probably wants to find out whether or not you will go along with her agenda for your interaction without necessarily revealing what that agender is. If she wants a one night stand she wants to know you won’t be clingy the morning after. If she wants something long-term she wants to know you’re not the kind of guy to take her on a few dates, get her into bed then dump her.

and she wants to determine this information about you without revealing her own agenda because if she does you might lie to her and because her friends are probably there or nearby and of course men talk and she doesn’t want to damage her reputation.

This is also why she wants to get rid of you, when she’s decided to get rid of you, without causing a scene. She wants other men to approach her and if she has the bar staff escort you out with your arms behind your back it’s going to put other men off. This is why a woman in this situation has a vested interest in telling you no in a way that she thinks will not cause you to make a fuss. Unfortunately this can be so subtle as to not actually be understood as no at all.

So there are two approaches. One is to become as good at being misleading and vague as Neurotypical people The other is to find ways to shift conversations back to a transactional basis where both parties are directly revealing information about each other in order to come to an understanding about what they want and what they’re prepared to do.

For example a person could ask the girl “What would it take for a guy to get your number?” Phrasing it that way invites her to set out her own conditions for being interested in you. If she says they have to have a good sense of humour you can immediately resort to your jokes etc.

Looking back my mother used to take this approach on a lot of problems. If you would ask someone directly to make an exception to allow you to do something you wouldn’t normally be allowed to do, like enroll a 15-year-old in a college that normally only accepts people 16+, they would normally say no that’s impossible. But she would ask people the question in a way that invited them to solve the problem of bending the rules and finding a loophole. She would say things like ’if someone had to do X how would they go about getting it through these rules?’

It probably isn’t going to make a woman spill all her personal secrets and hand you the secret thing that will make her swoon on a silver platter. But it does shift the focus from indirect Smalltalk trying to feel things out without explicitly asking them onto a direct basis Where people are talking about what they like, don’t like, want, don’t want. 

My supposition is that teaching autistic adults scripts for social interaction is counter-productive. We should full on teach autistic people to manipulate Neurotypicals (and I point out all of the interactions I’ve described above involve a degree of manipulation on both sides) or we teach autistic people ways to derail conversations from being ambiguous to transactional. Ways that seem natural rather than very off putting.