by Ty Tashiro
After the WWWF debacle, I began to wonder whether there was something fundamentally wrong with me and if there was an explanation for kids like me who had trouble figuring out how to manage social life. I didn’t know anything about psychological diagnoses at the time, but we can speculate about how I would have been described by looking at my presenting problems. If a psychologist had written a clinical summary to describe what seventh-grade Ty Tashiro was like, it may have looked like this:
Client appears uncomfortable looking people in the eye. Poor posture. Wore a starched oxford with pleated khakis pulled high on his waist. He reports being shy and rarely initiating conversations with peers, but he does identify three friends carried over from elementary school. Reports that he is often worried about saying the wrong thing in social situations. Client makes an unusual number of lists in his Trapper Keeper, which include a top-ten list of baseball pitchers based on an equation accounting for their earned-run-average and win-loss record. Patient is unusually rigid about his adherence to daily routines. Tuesday mornings he wakes at 6:45 A.M. to watch the sanitation workers take away the trash, Monday through Friday he reserves 3:30 to 5:30 P.M. for a series of structured basketball drills that are listed in his notebook with the amount of time to be spent on each drill. Sundays after dinner he plots the trajectory of a handful of stocks with hand-drawn line graphs from the Sunday paper. Disruption of any of these routines causes significant psychological distress.
My behavior was definitely not normal, but would you have called me unique or was I better described with a diagnosis? If we apply the rule of five to my case, then clinicians would probably consider five possibilities: high-functioning autism, social anxiety, introversion, a personality disorder, or social awkwardness.
Part of the confusion around these kinds of diagnostic distinctions is that diagnoses like major depressive disorder, substance abuse, social phobia, autism, and hundreds of other DSM diagnoses are categorical, which implies that people have a disorder or they do not have a disorder. But what if I told you that autism characteristics are not confined to the 1 percent of people who are autistic and instead spill generously toward the middle of a bell curve where normality resides?
Simon Baron-Cohen heads the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and he is one of the leading experts in the study of autism. In a 2001 paper published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues reported the results of a series of studies intended to validate a measure of autism characteristics called the Autism Quotient. The Autism Quotient includes fifty items that assess five characteristics commonly exhibited by people with autism: social skill deficits, communication problems, detail focused, trouble switching attention, and an active imagination. Scores on the Autism Quotient can range from zero (no autism characteristics) to fifty (all characteristics present).
Baron-Cohen and his colleagues administered the Autism Quotient to two groups, an autism group that included individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism and a control group that included 174 adults recruited from the general population. The first finding of interest was that the average score in the control group was not zero. The control group’s average Autism Quotient score was sixteen, which suggests the average person feels challenged by a few aspects of social life. By comparison, the average score in the autism group was thirty-five, which was more than double the average of the control group. Baron-Cohen found that the optimal cutoff to distinguish people with autism and without autism was thirty-two.
Also notice that the distribution of autism characteristics in the general population falls along a bell curve, which means that some people have scores that are well above average. People in the above-average range of autism characteristics, those who scored between twenty-four and thirty-one on the Autism Quotient, would fall roughly between the eighty-fifth and ninety-eighth percentile. They are somewhere between the average score of sixteen autistic characteristics and a diagnosable score of thirty-two autistic characteristics. So what do you call someone who is not autistic, but has considerable difficulty with social skills, communication, and an unusually obsessive focus? I would call that awkward.
Figure 2.2 The distribution of autism characteristics in the general population. The number of autism characteristics are plotted on the horizontal axis and the percent of participants with each score are plotted on the vertical axis. Based on a study by Baron-Cohen et al. (2001) in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
The relationship between autism and awkwardness illustrates a broader concept in clinical psychology and psychiatry, which is that people who are considered in psychological terms to be “normal” can have milder forms of characteristics that are associated with serious conditions. Just as people with melancholy characteristics are not necessarily diagnosable with major depressive disorder and people who are unusually orderly are not necessarily diagnosable with obsessive-compulsive disorder, people who are socially awkward are not necessarily autistic.
This distinction between individuals who are awkward versus autistic is more than semantic; in fact it’s very important to keep in mind that awkward is not the same as autistic. The criteria for an autism diagnosis suggests a level of social impairment and repetitive behavior that is far more severe than the social skill deficits and obsessive focus that are characteristic of awkward people. Over 50 percent of individuals with moderate to severe autism have an intellectual disability and many will be unlikely to live independent lives as adults. Autistic children’s behavior might include explosive outbursts from the sound of a blender or vacuum or profound language impairments. Caregivers hoping to feel some kind of connection with their autistic child sometimes say that their children’s social and communication deficits make the children feel “unreachable.”
At a societal level, careless or overzealous diagnoses of autism dilute the resources available for autistic people given the limited mental health budgets in schools and communities. There are also negative consequences when clinicians try to squeeze awkward people into autism diagnoses, because a misdiagnosis can result in psychological or educational interventions that do more harm than good. It’s important not to refer to awkward people as autistic or “on the spectrum” for pragmatic purposes, but also because doing so disrespects the significant struggles people with autism and their families face.
As I look back on my childhood social struggles, a diagnosis of high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome did not seem like an apt description of my social struggles. As an informal assessment, I took the Autism Quotient and asked a couple of family members to rate me on the Autism Quotient in reference to how they remembered me as a seventh grader. My scores fell short of the cutoff for high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome, but let’s say that my scores were clearly above average.
Extroverted, Confident, and Totally Awkward
WITH A HIGH-FUNCTIONING autism diagnosis ruled out as a cause of my social difficulties, there are three explanations besides awkwardness to consider as possible explanations: social anxiety, a personality disorder, and introversion. We will see that all of these traits can be related to awkwardness, but they are not synonymous with awkwardness.
As a seventh grader I usually felt intense anxiety about my ability to navigate upcoming social situations such as my daily bus ride to school and going to birthday parties, which suggests that social anxiety, also called social phobia, could be a plausible explanation for my struggles. Social anxiety is a diagnosis for people who feel an excessive fear of social interaction and an unreasonable concern that they will embarrass themselves or be negatively judged. The difference between social anxiety and awkwardness is that social anxiety is primarily an unreasonable fear about being inappropriate whereas awkwardness refers to one’s actual ability to be appropriate. Awkward people are often anxious about how they will navigate upcoming interactions, but their worry is not necessarily excessive or unreasonable. It
was actually reasonable for me to have some worry about doing something inappropriate, which rules out social anxiety as a primary explanation. Based on my past attempts at navigating interpersonal situations, my concerns about making a less-than-stellar impression were reasonable.
I could appear insensitive because of my aloof nature and inattention to social expectations, like failing to follow the social rules of people waiting in line at a store or failing to respond empathically to someone’s difficult situation. Personality disorders, such as being a sociopath or a narcissist, are characterized by pervasive insensitivity to others’ needs that is driven by their cloying selfishness. Awkward people can also appear insensitive, but unlike sociopaths or narcissists, their insensitive behavior is often unintentional and caused by their lack of understanding about how to handle a delicate situation. Sociopaths and narcissists have an astute understanding of social expectations and they can appear charming, but they use their social savvy to manipulate others. Although there is no excuse for the instances when I inadvertently hurt other people’s feelings or my other insensitive moments, they were better explained by my social clumsiness rather than malice.
Compared to most kids, I preferred to spend more time alone, liked one-on-one interactions instead of groups, and I appeared shy during new social interactions. Introversion is distinguishable from awkwardness because most introverted people can readily understand social expectations and effectively meet those expectations, it’s just that they prefer not to interact as often as people who are extroverted. Introversion is about preferences for social interaction, whereas awkwardness is about the ability to effectively interact. As Susan Cain explains in her book Quiet, introverted people might have social troubles because their preferences for social interaction do not match the cult of extroversion that predominates in countries like the United States. Although introverted kids may look apprehensive when they walk into a social situation, they do not become immobilized by uncertainty about what to do when they walk in the door. Although I was introverted, introversion was not the best explanation for my social struggles.
Among the five explanations we considered for my social struggles—awkwardness, autism, social anxiety, personality disorder, and introversion—awkwardness appeared to be the best way to describe my social behavior. Being a socially awkward person is not best explained by an emotional disposition, a motivation, or a preference; rather it’s a lack of intuition about how to navigate social life. This conclusion brings us back to our original question, Is there a problem with being awkward? In the world of clinical psychiatry and psychology, the answer would be no, but we have also seen that awkward individuals have significant deficits in social skills and communication that make it difficult for them to effectively engage in the complexities of social life. Awkward individuals find themselves at a complicated intersection, caught in the gray area where society tries to draw clear lines between normality and abnormality. It’s hard for awkward people to navigate simple social situations like going to the store or asking a teacher for assistance, and these struggles with routine social interactions can keep others from discovering what awkward people are really like. We usually need to give them some time to understand their unique views, appreciate their sharp wit, or benefit from their kindhearted gestures. Sometimes awkward people think to themselves, “If only other people could get to know me, then I think they would like me.”
I have repeatedly found that a little patience with awkward individuals’ clumsy handling of minor social expectations is well worth the wait. Someone’s social grace has little to do with their sense of fairness, kindness, or loyalty. In fact, awkward people sometimes have a heightened sense of fairness or compassion because they know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of unfair or unkind acts. A good example of this comes from our aloof, isolated, and clumsy Hans Asperger.
Asperger published his seminal paper about autism in 1944, but his work with the boys featured in this case study began years earlier in his laboratory at the University of Vienna. In his book NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman provides a detailed account of how Asperger’s research was complicated by the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and its spread to Austria. Many of Asperger’s medical school colleagues at the University of Vienna fled to other countries or were sent to death camps for their Jewish heritage. The Nazi doctrine included beliefs about eugenics and Asperger’s autistic children were exactly the kinds of kids who were at risk of being shipped off by the Nazis to death camps for being “genetically inferior.”
I imagine Asperger in the midst of this turmoil trying to make sense of the illogical and hateful ideologies spreading like a disease through Austrian culture. Here was a man who had trouble understanding how to navigate the smallest social expectations and who seemed less than fully capable of forming emotional ties even to those closest to him. But Asperger clearly understood that decent societies need to adhere to larger social expectations, such as respecting diversity, holding life dear, and helping those in need.
Asperger risked his personal safety by continuing to research and talk about his autistic patients, and he somehow mustered enough social acumen to deftly advocate for his patients in the face of grave danger. During a pair of raids on his lab, when the Nazis came to arrest him and presumably send his patients off to extermination camps, he managed to talk his way out of danger along with the help of his more socially skilled colleagues. While he delivered lectures about his research he intentionally called his patients “little professors” rather than “autistic psychopaths,” which was a deft political move to communicate their social value and a way to protect these children he had grown to love and care for.
Dreaming of Social Fluency
AFTER MY WWWF debacle, I became fixated on Coach Stenson’s charge to figure out the “social thing,” but I discovered that trying to become less awkward when you have an awkward mind is like trying to find your misplaced prescription eyeglasses. You need to find your glasses so that you can see more clearly, but you cannot find your glasses because you cannot see clearly. It’s a cruel irony, but you have no choice but to keep looking for what you need. The task for awkward people is to find a way to systematically search for what they need and, when they find it, they see the social world in a new way.
My social life would get much better and ultimately ended up exceeding anything I imagined as a seventh grader. I have also seen a number of my awkward friends, students, and clients improve their social skills and enjoy social lives that are immensely gratifying to them. What is common across the awkward people I have seen improve their social lives is that they had a plan, were open to changing their habits, and were willing to engage in the systematic practice necessary to improve their social understanding and skills.
When some of my sociable friends heard that I was writing a book about awkwardness, they frequently posed a fair question: If awkward people know they are awkward, then why don’t they just stop being awkward? It’s a fair question, but it shows the disconnect between how socially skilled and awkward people see the world. Sociable people see life broadly illuminated while awkward people see it with a narrow spotlight, which makes sociable people wonder how an awkward person does not recognize the interactions that are taking place center stage, while awkward people wonder why socially fluent people are not as compelled by what they are seeing with their spotlighted view.
Awkward people usually would love to be less awkward and dearly wish that they found it easier to navigate social life. But they need specific insights into the rules of social interactions that feel like proprietary information no one will tell them in plain terms.
A moment of valuable insight about how I could improve my social skills occurred during my middle-school Spanish class. Señorita Montgomery told us that we would know that we were becoming proficient or even fluent in Spanish when we began to think or dream in Spanish. She said that once the meanings of words and the grammar rules became automatic, we would be able to f
ocus more on understanding abstract things like what people were feeling and pick up on cultural nuances. I realized that being socially skilled is like becoming fluent in a language and that most people are socially fluent. Just as most children cannot help but become linguistically fluent in their native language by grade school, most children immersed in a social world become socially fluent by grade school.
The idea of social fluency was further reinforced when I asked my mom why some of the kids at her clinic saw speech and language pathologists. She told me that these kids were no different from anyone else, but some of them had difficulties such as stuttering because their mouths would not cooperate with what their minds intended. She said that stuttering could be embarrassing and when kids became self-conscious the anxiety they felt could make a stutter worse.
I realized that learning a language or learning to overcome a stutter requires a bottom-up approach that begins with mastering a set of fundamentals. To learn Spanish I had to memorize vocabulary words, practice properly rolling my double r, and learn grammatical rules about how to order words. Kids with a stutter had to spend hours practicing th sounds from hitting the back of their teeth, or the articulation of an l sound by lifting their tongues to the top of their mouths and then exhaling as they let their tongues lower.
I realized that at some point, second-language speakers no longer have to listen carefully for the noun in a sentence or work hard to think about whether the verb was used in the past, present, or future tense. Eventually with enough practice, people learning a second language shift from a mechanical understanding of vocabulary and basic grammar to a fluency that allows them to speak without having to consciously think about vocabulary and grammatical rules. Once people start to experience proficiency or fluency, they are able to enjoy the person and the situation, which allows them to reach a depth of connection that is far more gratifying.