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Personality Secrets in Your MP3 Player
Jeremy Dean writes "Once past saying 'hello' and 'how are you?' to someone you've just met, what is next? How do we make friends and get to know other people? Psychologists have talked about the importance of body language, physical appearance and clothing but they've not been so keen on what we actually talk about. A recent study put participants in same-sex and opposite-sex pairings and told them to get to know each other over 6 weeks (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Analysing the results, they found the most popular topic of conversation was music. What is it about music that's so useful when we first meet someone and what kind of information can we extract from the music another person likes? "
http://poll.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/quotes "Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western."
Some of us out there have a really hard time making friends. You are able to just make friends because you've passively learned the social protocols for doing so. They've become second nature to you. But there are a lot of people out there who, for one reason or another, never really learned the proper protocols, or haven't learned them to the degree that they are able to make friends easily. Woe be to you if you're one of these people and an adult. It effects every area of your life, and you are given almost no opportunity to learn by doing. People tend to not want to put up with socially awkward people in their inner circle. There's some very real value in being able to study behavior to make up for lost time, and apply those lessons to our own behavior, so we have some hope of fitting in.