You definitely should read Impro and maybe take a class on improvisational theater if you can. Being status blind is a huge handicap that I’m not sure can be overcome. You just have to learn.
There’s a reason that nerds have trouble succeeding at social excellence when trying to reason about it from scratch. This stuff is extremely complicated and normal people are relying on built in heuristics to do much of the work.
You definitely should read Impro and maybe take a class on improvisational theater if you can. Being status blind is a huge handicap that I’m not sure can be overcome. You just have to learn.
http://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178
Japanese is nice in this regard because they actually have special words and language used to refer to people of significantly higher or lower status.
Also: teasing generally involves saying things you both know isn’t true and you have mutual knowledge that the other knows you know it isn’t true.
Great talk by Pinker about mutual knowledge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
There’s a reason that nerds have trouble succeeding at social excellence when trying to reason about it from scratch. This stuff is extremely complicated and normal people are relying on built in heuristics to do much of the work.