Teaching Social Interaction Skills with Stealthy Training Techniques

Abstract Military personnel operate in foreign countries where they must interact with strangers from dissimilar cultures. Adversaries can blend in among locals to hide in the social landscape, using complex tactics that exploit their advantages in asymmetric warfare. Soldiers’ ability to navigate this social terrain and effectively interact with civilians can have consequences at all levels of warfare. Good social interaction skills can effectively enhance mission success and lead to friendly relations and local support; conversely, poor social skills can generate negative perceptions or worse, incite adversarial actions that put the mission and Soldiers at risk. Stealth Training leverages principles from the U.S. Army's Adaptive Soldier/Leader Training and Education (ASLTE), in which Soldiers learn to interact with others in an asymmetric power situation through experiencing authentic social interactions with their instructors. Stealth trainers aim to modify existing instructor training by demonstrating key behaviors that shape the exercise of leadership and authority. The essential issue is whether the instructor develops leader attributes in their own students by modeling these positive social interaction skills. Such instructor training is expected to improve social skills in students. This investigation tests the effectiveness of Stealth Training in (1) teaching instructors to implement the approach themselves and (2) improving social skills in soldiers. Results showed that Stealth-trained instructors were more likely to exhibit key social skills when teaching their own students. Similarly, students of Stealth-trained instructors were, overall, more likely than students of traditional instructors to exhibit the desired social skills in mock Key Leader Engagements.