Social Skills: Definition, Examples, & Training

By Nathalie Boutros, Ph.D.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.

What are social skills? Learn what social skills are, why they’re important and how you can develop your own social skills.

*This page may include affiliate links; that means we earn from qualifying purchases of products.

Think about some of the people you know who have amazing social skills. You can think about people you know from your own life, or about famous people who seem to engage and interact with other people with ease and fluidity. People like John Stewart, Barack Obama, or Oprah Winfrey all have excellent social skills.

What characterizes people like this? They probably make you feel really heard when you speak to them. They’re probably able to hold your attention and be really engaging when they speak. They probably know the right thing to say at the right time. In this article, we’ll talk about social skills. We’ll review what social skills are, list out some social skills, talk about why they’re important, and give some examples of important specific social skills. We’ll also talk about some important social skills for adults, teens, and kids. Along the way, we’ll review some things that you can do to develop and improve your social skills. ​

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What Are Social Skills? (A Definition)

So many of the things that we do require some degree of social competency. This makes it difficult to come up with a list of specific social skills. The researchers and psychologists who study these sorts of things don’t have a concrete and complete definition of social skills that they all agree on. However, very broadly, we can define social skills as any of the skills or groups of skills that a person might use to initiate, develop, and maintain communication or relationships with other people (Riggio et al., 1990).

List of Social Skills

The very broad category of social skills can be divided into 6 subcategories (Riggio, 1986).

1. Emotional Expressivity: How good are you at expressing your emotions nonverbally? Can you spontaneously and accurately express your emotions? Can you non-verbally express your thoughts and feelings? People with high emotional expressivity are often described as energetic, animated, charismatic, or motivational. They may be good at transmitting and communicating their emotional states to others. People high in emotional expressivity may have a large influence on other people’s emotions. They may bring the room down when they are upset and may also be the life of the party when they are happy.
2. Emotional Sensitivity: How good are you at receiving and decoding other people’s nonverbal communication? People high in emotional sensitivity may be concerned with and vigilant about monitoring other people’s nonverbal emotional cues. They may also be prone to having their moods affected by others around them. If you can almost instantly tell how another person feels about you, if you are sensitive and understanding, or if you can easily tell when someone is trying to keep something from you, you may have high emotional sensitivity.
3. Emotional Control: Are you able to control and regulate your emotional and nonverbal displays? People high in emotional control may be good emotional actors. They may be able to mask their emotions or to put on emotions that they don’t feel. For example, if you are good at laughing at jokes that aren’t funny or at putting on a happy face when you’re upset, you may be high in emotional control. You may also be good at moderating the level of emotion that you express in particular environments. For example, if a coworker makes you extremely angry, a high degree of emotional control might help you display frustration and irritation in a way that is appropriate to a workplace setting. If you are good at maintaining a calm exterior even when you are upset or if you are good at maintaining a facade of appropriate behavior even when the behavior doesn’t reflect your true feelings, you may have high emotional control. 
4. Social Expressivity: How skilled are you verbally and in social interactions with other people? People high in social expressivity may appear outgoing, extraverted, or gregarious. They may be good at starting and maintaining conversations. They may also be good at speaking spontaneously, without feeling the need to control or moderate what they are saying. If you enjoy talking to a wide range of people, if you find that in conversations you are often the one doing most of the talking, or if you often take the initiative to introduce yourself to people, you may be high in social expressivity.
5. Social Sensitivity: How good are you at decoding and understanding verbal communication? How strong is your general knowledge of the norms governing appropriate social behavior? People high in social sensitivity are generally attentive to other people. They may be good listeners. However, knowledge of social norms and rules may lead some people to become overly concerned with the appropriateness of their own and other people’ behavior. If you fear that you take things people say too personally, if you often worry about being misunderstood, and if you are very concerned with good manners, you may have high social sensitivity. 
6. Social Control: How good are you at social self-presentation? People high in social control may be tactful, socially adept, and self-confident. They may be good at acting, at playing a variety of social roles. They may move easily through different social situations, adjusting their behavior accordingly. If you are able to easily switch from your “work persona” to your “family persona” to your “friends persona” you may be high in social control. If you are able to fit in with a range of different people of different ages, education levels, and backgrounds, you may be high in social control.

Why Social Skills Are Important

Having authentic interactions with people can have several benefits (McCarthy, 2020) including:
​Improved functioning of the immune system

• Reductions in stress hormone levels
• Decreases in heart rate
• Decreased feelings of depression, anxiety, and other mental and emotional health benefits
• Improved cognition

Engaging with people verbally, talking to them either in person, on the phone, or over video call can trigger the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin may increase many of our most positive emotions including feelings of compassion, generosity, and kindness. Interestingly, text-based interactions, like those that we most often have online, don’t produce this increase in serotonin. Text-based online interactions instead seem to trigger dopamine release. While dopamine release also leads to positive, enjoyable feelings, these feelings don’t generally have the same depth and sense of connection that serotonin-associated feelings have (Sanders, 2018). Conversations, whether in person or at a distance, feel good!

Social Skills Examples

Celeste Headlee, author of the book “We Need to Talk, How to Have Conversations that Matter” (Headlee, 2017) has ten tips on how to have an effective and rewarding conversation.

1. Don’t multitask: Keep your phone and other devices out of your hands and out of sight. If you’re on zoom, don’t have any other browser windows open.
   
2. Don’t lecture: Don’t go into a conversation intending to change the other person’s mind.
   
3. Ask open-ended questions: Authentic conversation is unlikely to come from yes/no questions or from guessing what the other person believes. Short, open-ended questions like “What happened?” or “How are you feeling?” are more likely to keep the conversation going than leading or assuming questions like “Were you sad?” or “Are you okay?”. Avoid asking questions that may sound judgemental like “Why would you do that?” or “What were you thinking?”
   
4. Go with the flow of the conversation: You may have a great story or anecdote about something that was brought up a few points ago. Avoid the instinct to force the conversation back to a topic that it has moved on from.
   
5. If you don’t know, say so: When someone talks about something you’re not familiar with, ask them to tell you about it! Don’t google it or pretend that you know about it.
   
6. Don’t assume that the other person has the same experiences that you do: Don’t try to top someone when they tell you about a hard or painful experience that they lived through. You may think that you are being empathetic or relating, but it can come across as narcissistic one-upmanship. If the other person asks about your experience, you can talk about it. But otherwise, let them express their feelings.
   
7. Don't repeat yourself: People are less likely to listen to you if you repeat yourself. You’re showing them that they don’t need to listen to you and don’t need to remember the things that you say because you’ll be repeating yourself often. When people know you’ll only say things once they’ll make a greater effort to listen the first time.
   
8. Leave out the details: You don’t need to verbalize your entire internal monologue. When telling a story there are usually several details that you can leave out. This keeps your listener focused on what’s important and makes your story punchier and more interesting.
   
9. Practice engaged listening: Don’t just listen to the words that people say. Try to get a sense of the idea that they are trying to express.
   
10. Be brief: Attention spans are generally about a minute long. Try to keep each point or comment under a minute.
    

Social Skills for Adults

Improvisational theater or “improv” as it's often called, with its focus on performing without any preparation or planning, can help strengthen many social skills (Bermant, 2013). Improv is a highly interactive social activity. It is done with a group or team and requires group members to be very attuned and attentive to one another. Improv encourages the development of several social skills including attentive listening, acceptance, nonverbal communication, interpersonal trust, and peer support.

Improv stresses the importance of being useful to the scene. During a scene, improv performers focus on looking for things that they can do to help their scene partner(s) and to make a good show. This requires performers to be fully present and engaged in the moment, not thinking about themselves or their anxieties and insecurities. 

A successful performance comes when all scene partners are able to be attentive to and support one another. Improv is not an individual act. It is a product of group creativity and group interactions. This makes improv very much like successful and fulfilling social interactions, which are also ideally group products. 

Understanding that all group members are supporting one another builds trust and helps group members feel safe taking risks. Improv is also characterized by uncertainty. There is no script and the performance develops unpredictably as a result of group members interacting with one another. Performers can’t plan for what will happen and need to stay fluid and present in the moment. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is preferred over contrived invention.

In the video below, the speaker articulates how he used some of the skills of improv to improve his interactions with people.

Video: Social Skills Everyone Should Know​

He outlines 5 tips, inspired by techniques and strategies used in improv, for making small talk with strangers;

1. Say yes to what you feel and think. Don’t listen to your inner voice that wants to keep you quiet. You can’t control what other people think about you. Don’t feel self-conscious or overly concerned with other people’s opinions.
2. It's okay to be vulnerable. Trying to protect yourself from negative interactions may also stop you from having positive interactions. If you like someone’’s sneakers, tell them! They may snub you, or they may be flattered and you may have a pleasant interaction.
3. Don't try to be interesting, instead be interested. The curious mind will always be charming. Focus your energy on what your conversation partner is saying, not on what you want to say next or contribute. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
4. If you want to be appreciated, appreciate others. Thank people. Express your gratitude. To everyone you can. Don’t be afraid of failure or rejection.
5. It's not about you. Don’t take things personally. If you get ignored, rejected, or snubbed, most of the time it has nothing to do with you. You don’t know what the other person is going through. Keep reaching out and don’t take rejection too personally.

Social Skills for Teens

Participating in improvisational theater groups can also be beneficial for teens. Middle and high school students who participated in an improv comedy program for ten weeks showed reduced symptoms of social anxiety (Felsman et al., 2019). The following skills all increased: 

• social skills
• Hope
• Creativity
• Self-efficacy
• comfort engaging with others
• willingness to make mistakes. 

​
There were also marginal decreases in measures of depression.

The improv curriculum consisted of students first building confidence and trust by playing games to encourage eye contact and sustained attention. Students then worked on accepting and contributing to each other's ideas. They did this through a variety of theater games and exercises. For example, in one of these games the students tell a story as a group by having each person sequentially add a single word to the story. This encourages students to listen to one another, value each other’s contributions, and have their contributions heard and valued. Students then focused on committing to an unpredictable, improvised environment by taking part in exercises like “space walk” which guides students through suggestions about their physical environments. Students also learned about expressing and reading emotions, being present and attentive in the moment, and about flexibility and adaptability.

Social Skills for Kids

Michelle Garcia Winner’s social thinking curriculum was developed over 25 years ago as a program to help children with autism and other developmental disabilities develop social and emotional skills. This program has since been expanded and now offers material and support to typically developing children as well as to youth and adults. She has identified several social skills that are important for children. Some of these skills include:
​

• Share imagination: The ability to create a pretend world with another person and then to move through that jointly-created world. When children play “restaurant”, “families”, “pet store”, “cowboys”, “astronauts” or any of the other creative pretend play games that captivate them for hours, they are using their capacity for shared imagination. One child brings another child an empty plate and the second child pretends to eat from that plate. Shared imagination skills are very important for cooperative and imaginative play. Having shared imagination allows children to adapt their play based on input from another person (Winner & Crooke, 2022a).
• Social perspective taking: Being able to adapt what you say and do to another person. This requires being able to take the perspective or point of view of another person. These skills are required to treat other people as human beings with their own feelings and desires. If you cannot see things from another person’s point of view, you will be unlikely to let them have their turn. You may even make no effort to avoid knocking them over or may take something that you want away from them (Winner & Crooke, 2022b).

Social Skills Games

Several games exist that can help people of all ages strengthen their social skills. Playing games may allow you to practice social skills in a safe and enclosed environment and may help you develop skills that you can take out of the game context.

• 52 Essential Social Skills: Recommended for ages 5 - 9. These cards contain questions to prompt conversations on how to handle a variety of different social situations. 
• Don’t Go Bananas: Recommended for ages 6 - 12. A game to help children identify their anger triggers and learn about emotional regulation.
• Mad Dragon: Recommended for ages 6 - 12. An “uno”-style game that also includes cards to prompt discussion about emotional regulation.
• Impulsive Eddie: Recommended for ages 8 - 12. A game to help guide thinking about impulse control.
• Together Land: Recommended for ages 6 and up. A card game based on crazy eights that focuses on the identification and regulation of emotions.
• Social Genius: Recommended for ages 14 and up. A game that helps to develop many of the speaking and expression skills that are developed during formal debate training.
• Head Rush: Recommended for ages 12 and up. A game that helps to develop the skills required to maintain a good conversation including being present in the moment, and adapting to changing topics flexibly and quickly.

Social Skills Worksheets

The Minneapolis public school system has developed a document with several worksheets to help target and develop social skills. Some of the social skills targeted in the document include friendship, self-esteem, communication, conflict resolution, and teasing. The document can be downloaded here.

Articles Related to Social Skills

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

• Interpersonal Skills: Definition, Examples, and Activities
• Communication Skills: Definition, Examples, & Activities
• Socializing: Definition, Skills, & Examples ​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Books Related to Social Skills

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

• The Social Skills Guidebook: Manage Shyness, Improve Your Conversations, and Make Friends, Without Giving Up Who You Are
• How to Talk to Anyone About Anything: Improve Your Social Skills, Master Small Talk, Connect Effortlessly, and Make Real Friends (Communication Skills Training)
• Improve Your Social Skills

Final Thoughts on Social Skills

Almost everything that you do that involves other people requires or involves social skills. Social skills are primarily about communicating with other people, both verbally and nonverbally. Being able to understand other people and being able to be understood by other people are both the essence of social skills. These skills can be developed through games, worksheets, or even by participating in improvisational theater. 

One of the primary ways that you may be able to improve your social skills may be by simply being more present and mindful in your social interactions. So often when we are engaging with another person, we aren’t giving that interaction our full attention. If we aren’t looking at a screen, we may be thinking about something else, or even thinking about what we want to say next. At their core, many social skills are about being mindful of other people. If you can concentrate all of your attention on what the other person is saying, if you can be completely mindful, attentive, and in the present moment when you are engaging with another person, you will be well on your way to improving your social skills.

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References

• Bermant, G. (2013). Working with (out) a net: improvisational theater and enhanced well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 929.
• Felsman, P., Seifert, C. M., & Himle, J. A. (2019). The use of improvisational theater training to reduce social anxiety in adolescents. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 63, 111-117.
• Headlee, C. (2017). We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. Harper Wave
• McCarthy, C. (2020). Boost morale, productivity with actual conversations. College Athletics and the Law, 17(6), 6-7.
• Riggio, R. E. (1986). Assessment of basic social skills. Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 51(3), 649.
• Riggio, R. E., Throckmorton, B., & Depaola, S. (1990). Social skills and self-esteem. Personality and Individual Differences, 11(8), 799-804.
• Sanders, L. (2018, October 1). ‘We Need To Talk’: Journalist shares tips for better conversations. The Standard News. 
• Winner, M.G. & Crooke, P. (2022a, March 21). What Is Shared Imagination & Why Is It So Important to Relationship Development? Social Thinking. 
• Winner, M.G. & Crooke, P. (2022b, May). Social Perspective Taking & The 5 Steps of Being with Others. Social Thinking. 

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