<story><title>How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)</title><url>http://time.com/3722418/become-someone-people-love-talk/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>onmobiletemp</author><text>I started paying attention to people and discovered a lot of this on my own over the course of three years. At some point i realized that whenever i talked to someone their eyes would glaze over and their face would go stony. Then theyd talk to someone else and their eyes would become focused and their face alive and animated. Laughter. I figured out this was because they didnt care about what i was saying or about my opinions. So i tried various things and looked at their eyes. Sometimes their eyes would become alive again and i could tell they cared. Slowly you learn what people want to hear. And its so true about smiling and body language, people feel uncomfortable if you dont project wellbeing. What you need to understand is that there is no logic in any of it. Humans are machines and the algorithms that they employ for attention and emotion are surprisngly uniform and very unintuitive for autists like me and you. Dont worry about the logic of whats hapenning, just think of what their algorithm is doing. Its verry dificult because you cant verify what people are thinking, you cant debug it and you cant start over -- you have to guess a lot. Overall people want to see big smiles and confident body posture. If you are slouched over people dont like it. If you stand up straight you will be amazed at how differently you are percieved. But it all has to be genuine. If youre trying to manipulate and understand people in a clinical way you will fail. All you need is a genuine desire to bond with people and the patience to pay attention to what seems to work and what doesnt.&lt;p&gt;I should also add that for me, and probably for most people like me, the process of figurimg out what people like and dont like is also partly a process of self discovery. Im not the kind of person thats in touch with himself. Discovering how your words impact other people will also teach you about how your mind, conciously or otherwise, reacts emotionally to the words of others. Overall ive been genuinely excited to learn about myself amd others and use that wisdom to help enjoy the presence of other people. For me its been a very productive process of growth and discovery. I think framing the problem of interpersonal relations within that context instead of the cringey, manipulative context of internet social tips really helped.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)</title><url>http://time.com/3722418/become-someone-people-love-talk/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text>The best bit of advice in the article:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The right question is “How do I get them talking about themselves?“&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve noticed that even if the only thing you do is ask someone their opinion, and listen attentively, there is some sort of distortion field effect.&lt;p&gt;They will often later recall you as knowledgeable, insightful, etc...even though you never did anything but ask questions.</text></comment>