How do we learn social skills?  Practice.

Let’s think about what is involved in a social interaction.  You have to make countless, split-second decisions.  You have to formulate and deliver conversational responses instantly.  While you do this decision-making, you have to pay constant attention to your body’s position, your facial expressions, and you are expected to make eye contact with the other person.  You have to attend to their expressions and nonverbal cues.  You have to think about their intentions and try to figure out what sort of agenda they have.

And you aren’t allowed a pause or a break while you consider your response.  There is no rule that allows you to take a five-second time-out in the middle of a conversation, if we’re playing by the rules of neurotypical society – such a pause means you’ve already lost the game.

There’s no way that you can succeed at this through conscious strategies and conscious decision-making.  You must do everything on autopilot, because it can’t be done otherwise.

That’s important to understand when we teach social skills.  Workbooks that teach conscious strategies are great for explaining what is going on in social interactions, because it all goes by too quickly for many of us to break it down without explicit help.  It’s an overwhelming amount of information.  The social curriculum sometimes isn’t so much a hidden curriculum as it is a curriculum that is waving itself frantically in front of your face whilst flashing with bright multicoloured lights: there’s too much of it all at once.  We can’t actually see what it is that we’re supposed to be learning, so we need help to break it down.  But this conscious approach is only the first level of learning, and it doesn’t get us to the place where we can actually do the social processing in the moment.  After we’ve taught the conscious strategy, it has to become automatic.  That means we must practice it in a setting that is both safe and realistic.

Roleplay helps, but that’s not enough – we have to be comfortable and confident enough to apply strategies it in the real world.  We can learn the strategy in an artificial setting, but we also need to learn it in realistic settings.  Context is everything.

So by all means, teach social skills with workbooks – as long as you follow up with actual, real-world practice.