When I said that it is learnt observationally, I mean that if someone simply tells you something, eg. that you should use social touching (http://www.businessinsider.com/habits-of-incredibly-charming-people-2014-4?IR=T), it doesn’t give you enough information to be able to integrate it into your habits. You’d want to actually see other people using that technique, then you might be confident enough to try it yourself without worrying that you were doing something inappropriate. Now you could try and write a description of what situations it works and what situations it doesn’t—but that would be very hard to enumerate and the instructions would be very hard to follow. But if you just show someone a few situations, they’ll probably be able to figure it out.
So, I was talking about observation vs. description—I wasn’t talking about the trade-off between time spent observing and time spent practising.
Interesting feedback.
When I said that it is learnt observationally, I mean that if someone simply tells you something, eg. that you should use social touching (http://www.businessinsider.com/habits-of-incredibly-charming-people-2014-4?IR=T), it doesn’t give you enough information to be able to integrate it into your habits. You’d want to actually see other people using that technique, then you might be confident enough to try it yourself without worrying that you were doing something inappropriate. Now you could try and write a description of what situations it works and what situations it doesn’t—but that would be very hard to enumerate and the instructions would be very hard to follow. But if you just show someone a few situations, they’ll probably be able to figure it out.
So, I was talking about observation vs. description—I wasn’t talking about the trade-off between time spent observing and time spent practising.