The social preference—communication, groups, and synergy#

If you lean social, you communicate well with people, both verbally and non-verbally. People listen to you, or come to you for advice, and you are sensitive to their motivations, feelings and moods. You listen well and understand other people’s views. You may enjoy mentoring or counselling others.

You like to learn in groups or classes, or to spend one-on-one time with a teacher or instructor. You sharpen your thinking by bouncing ideas off other people and listening to how they respond. You prefer to work through issues, ideas and problems with a group, and you thoroughly enjoy a “clicking”, synergistic set of people.

You prefer to stay around after class and talk. You like social activities rather than doing your own thing, and games that involve other people—card games, board games, team sports such as football, soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball and hockey.

Some pursuits that lean on this preference include counselling, teaching, training and coaching, sales, politics and human resources.

Common phrases#

As with the other styles, you are more likely to use phrases that reflect your dominant style. Here are some you may use:

• Let’s work together on this.
• We can work it out.
• Tell me what you are thinking.
• Help me understand this.
• Let’s pull some people together to discuss.
• Let’s explore our options.

One note before you read on#

Earlier editions of this manual treated “social” as a rule: if you’re a social learner, learn in groups. I want to be careful here. A social preference is real and worth knowing—it tells you what energises you and where you’ll naturally do your best thinking. What it isn’t is a guarantee that working in a group will, by itself, make you learn more. When researchers went looking for evidence that matching teaching to a person’s preferred style raises how much they learn, they came up empty (Pashler et al., 2008). So treat your social tilt as exactly that: a preference. It tells you what you enjoy, not which method will reliably make a fact stick.

That matters because group work is a double-edged thing. Done well, it’s one of the most powerful tools you have. Done loosely—a comfortable chat where it’s never clear who actually understood the material—it can quietly let you off the hook. The good news is that learning with other people has been studied hard, and we know the conditions that make it pay off. That’s a method in its own right, separate from any style label, and it gets its own treatment: see learning with others .

So read the next section as “here’s how to put your social energy to work”, not “do this because you’re social”. A preference is the spark; the structure is what turns it into learning.

Putting your social energy to work#

You think best out loud and around people, so build your study that way when you can—just keep one rule in mind: everyone in the group has to do the cognitive work. A group that watches one person think learns about as much as that one person. So whatever you set up, make sure each person is retrieving, explaining or deciding, not just nodding along.

Teach what you’re learning. This is the single biggest lever your preference hands you. Explaining an idea to someone else forces you to pull it out of memory and reorganise it for an audience, and that act is where the gaps show up and get repaired—you learn it better than if you had only studied it for yourself (Fiorella & Mayer, 2013). Take turns being the teacher. Hand each person a slice of the material to explain back to the group.

Argue the hard questions. Pose a genuinely tricky problem, have everyone commit to an answer privately, then talk it through with someone who disagrees, and answer again. The disagreement does the work. This is the engine behind peer instruction, covered in learning with others .

Role-play together. Role-playing works well one-on-one or in a group. In aviation training, role-play the aerodrome: people walking “circuits”, making the right radio calls, with one playing the tower co-ordinating everyone. Or run it as instructor-and-student. Seeing the mistakes others make helps you avoid them later—and the ones you make are useful to everybody.

Build associations and visualisations as a group. Just make sure everyone understands what you’re doing, or you’ll get some interesting responses! Other people bring different perspectives, so the group often lands on more varied and imaginative images than you’d reach alone.

Share your assertions and scripts. Rather than reciting an assertion quietly to yourself, say it to the group—you’re almost signing a social contract that this is what you do, which strengthens it. Share your review checklists and “perfect performance” scripts too. Have each person write the part they most want to work on, then bring the scripts together.

Draw mind maps and systems diagrams in class. Appoint one drawer while the rest work through the material and suggest ideas. The group will have different views on how to represent something—that’s a feature, not a problem. If you can’t agree, take a copy of the group’s version and add your own thoughts. Often there’s no single right answer, so agree to disagree.

Practise procedures together. Working through behaviours or procedures as a group helps you handle variation. Two chairs in the middle of a classroom to simulate a cockpit can be as useful as a computer simulator or the real thing. The classroom is a risk-free place—safer to experiment, try new techniques and make mistakes there than in the real activity.

Lastly, if you’re working in a group it can help to have everyone do the learning-styles questionnaire. Not to sort people into boxes, but so the group understands why each person sees things differently, and so people can volunteer for activities that play to a strength—or stretch a preference they want to build.

Quick takeaway#

Enjoy people, learn out loud, and build a study group when you can. Just don’t treat “I’m social” as proof that any group will teach you more. The payoff comes from how the group is run—everyone doing the thinking, teaching each other, arguing the hard questions—not from the company itself. Your social energy is the spark; for the method that turns it into learning, head to learning with others .

And because no single preference is the whole story, it’s worth learning to range across all seven and build up the ones you use least: use every mode and strengthen your weaker styles .