Storytelling

Introduction

When someone asks me whether or not being a Duke fan as a UNC student was difficult, I tell a story about my freshman year of college:  It’s March 4th, 2006 and I’m watching the UNC/Duke game with a big group of close friends who are all UNC fans.  We’re in a friend’s dorm room all huddled together in front of the television.  My friends are nice people, but I wasn’t sure to how they’d react to me as a Duke fan.  So I decide to stay silent for the entire game.  This turns out to be way more difficult than I envisioned.  Duke pulls out to an early lead, but UNC evens and starts taking control in the 2nd half.  Throughout the topsy-turvy game, my emotions pressurize like water in a kettle.  All of a sudden, Shelden Williams, the Duke center, inflicts a demonstrative dunk, and I bellow out a massive “YEAAAAAAAAAAH!”.  My friends, confused and silent, turn and look at me.  One of my friends quips, “Aren’t you going for Carolina?”.  I nervously retort, “Oh yeah… whoops, wrong team… ha!”.

Instead of that story I could simply answer, “Yes, it was hard being a Duke fan at UNC”, but that connects weakly.  A story immerses my audience, especially when they can project themselves into my situation and feel my emotions.  Storytelling is an effective skill to improve interpersonal communication.

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Better nutrition = Less antisocial behavior?

Introduction

It’s hard to incorporate rigorous experimentation into social psychology studies.  For example, we want to know if living in a certain area allows students to perform better scholastically.  How do we control for this?  Well, we have to factor socioeconomic status, how much each student studies, how much their parents are involved, their interactions with peers, what television shows they watch, etc.  This is a difficult experiment.

So the following study is a blessing.  Researchers in the UK discovered a direct relationship between diets and violent behavior in inmates.  That means a biological factor (diet) affects their interpersonal behavior.  How interesting…

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Collective Intelligence (and how interpersonal skills help!)

Introduction

Think back to your school days.  Whenever your instructor assigned a group project, your first inclination was to try assemble the smartest group of people around, right?  The idea is that, collectively, you will be the smartest and accordingly do the best on the project.  Turns out that it’s actually not the best approach.  New research indicates that it is something else entirely!  Hint:  It involves interpersonal skills.

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Curiosity – A Technique to Ease Impressions

Introduction

Meeting folk for the first time can be a daunting task.  You want to make a good impression, especially if it’s someone important.  Negative emotions run the gamut of social anxiety to withdrawal.  Luckily, scientists are just as interested in solving this predicament.   Wake Forest researchers indicate that simply being curious and having a plan to learn more about the other person can go a long way.  Let’s look more into this…

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What can athletes teach us about improving our (social) skills?

One thing that I absolutely love about sports is that they’re microcosmic of society in general.  A sports team is like any other team: a research team, a legal team, etc.  An individual athlete is like any other chum working a job.  The main difference is that, in athletics, things are a lot simpler.  Way, way simpler.  For teams, success is dictated by wins and losses.  For individuals, there are a bevy of statistics that almost completely capture how valuable each athlete is, even in dynamic team sports such as basketball and soccer.

One thing that fascinates me about athletes is how they approach their jobs and improve their sporting ability.  I was particularly inspired by this blog post by Nolan Smith, a Duke basketball guard.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, most sports have a season.  In basketball, that’s the part of the year where you play and compete against other teams.  The rest of the year is the off-season.  The industrious athletes, such as Mr. Nolan Smith, will use this time to actually get better at their sport.  For Nolan, he’s working on his explosiveness and overall shooting ability.  He goes to the gym everyday, works with a trainer, and then plays pickup basketball.  So thinking horizontally here, why are WE, non-athletes, not doing the same thing?

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