Social Hacking

  Over a week since my last entry, sorry about that. I have had too much school work and I even had a couple of sick days. However, I will try to give you a couple of posts the coming week even though my workload is increasing exponentially.

  This time I want to talk about human in groups. As I have said before; people act differently depending on the situation. Being in a group with people you know will probably increase your confidence. You know how the group usually acts and you probably know your own roll in the group. However, being in a group like that could also mean that you agree to thing you don't usually agree with. Yes, I am talking about peer pressure.

Todays work:

  Start out by thinking about a group that you are usually in. This can be a class, your work, or just a clique of friends. What role do you have in this group? Think of who in the group takes the decisions. Who changes the subject when you are talking? Who comes with new ideas? Who is quiet most of the time? Give every person in your group a role that you think fits. Multiple people can have the same role. To see the role that a person fills can tell you a lot about the person and how the person acts. What can be really hard to see is if the person likes the role he or she is in. Do you like your role?

  Any school book would now start listing these different roles. I will not do that. The reason for this is that I don't think that there is a set number of roles. I believe it is not even possible to define all different roles in a group. And if you do manage to define say the top 100 roles, there will always be someone in some situation that would not fit any of these roles perfectly. If someone does not fit a role perfectly it will not be able to make perfect assumptions.

  Yes, taking this to an extreme. You will never be possible to make correct assumptions all the time (only I can do that)..

  The next step is to define relations between these roles. Ever played pokémon? Think of the relation as the big chart of the different strength and weaknesses of the different pokémons. If you never played pokémon then.. well really, who has never played pokémon?

  So, with all that done you probably know where I am headed with this. If you have defined the different roles and relations you should be able to predict what will happen in different situations a little better. If your group happens to be only your closes friends you can even try to create a situation yourself and see if it turns out the way you predicted.

  This exercise (as I will call it), is only about learning more about the people you are with. This is one way of getting to know your friends without being with them. It's also a great exercise to practice your social hacking skills and see how good you are at reading people.