ABSTRACT
Michael Argyle’s (1967) motor skill model of social behaviour, later known simply as ‘the social skill model’, marked a turning point in experimental social psychology, and in the systematic study of human relations and human working practices in general. It likened the way that people deal with one another to the way they deal with other complex entities in the world, especially the tools and machines they have to work with. The inspiration for this came from the realization that the problems of work seem to fall into two categories: problems of skill with the ‘objects’ of work themselves and problems of skill with people; and the further recognition that those may be just two aspects of the same general problem of skilled management of actions in a complex world. Furthermore, since there was already a good model for the analysis of physical skill, based on cybernetics, or the principle of self-regulation using negative-feedback loops, it was a logical step to extend that to serve as a model of people dealing with other people, according to their motives or goals, the discrepancies they detected between their goals and the current course of events, and the actions they could perform to reduce those discrepancies. This in turn gave rise to a more systematic study of the encoding and de-coding of interpersonal signals, and gave a unifying structure to the then burgeoning field of nonverbal communication research.
