I've often found Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to provide effective guidelines. He didn't do any scientific studies as far as I know, but he claims to have based his material on the behaviors of those who were interpersonally effective throughout history and then tweaked it for effectiveness in the course of several years of teaching it in seminars. I've seen it work wonders in situations that I thought were likely to go south quickly otherwise. And his material on being a good conversationalist definitely works marvelously in my experience - even if I don't always remember to apply it!
I've also found some personality typing systems to be immensely useful. I personally lean mostly on Riso & Hudon's Enneagram with occasional adjustments using the four dimensions of Myers-Briggs, though I've recently started looking into the Big Five due to a recommendation from a recent meet-up. (I can't tell as yet whether the Big Five is actually useful at all in the way the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs are.) There's something jaw-droppingly spectacular when you suddenly realize how to decode someone's personality enough to know a few magical phrases that dissolve conflict or open that person right up, or at least understand why they got so upset about something you didn't think was at all relevant.
Followup to Recovering Insufferable Genius
So, we've been talking a mighty amount on avoiding and understanding the common pitfalls and mistakes that plague most human minds for various biological, evolutionary and social reasons. This knowledge is supposed to be used for the sake of learning how to think proprely and clearly about the world, and for the sake of making the right choices, and making them quickly. Both blades of the weapon can have a dramatic effect on how we interact with people. Behaviors that would appear absurd and annoying to us would suddenly gain a history, reasons for their existence until now and even for their continued existence. The incomprehensible people around us suddenly become fairly simple and predictable, to the point that you might, every now and then, understand them better than they do themselves. They also become all that much more interesting. You find yourself observing them, gently pushing their buttons as you eagerly wait for what they are going to do next. Of course, this applies just as much to you yourself. You see your own past in a very different light, and Akrasia remains difficult to escape. But at least now you know what you're doing wrong.
Anyway, you've discovered the pleasures of socializing, and you've even acquired an "edge" over those who relied on intuition ever since they were young. What I want us to discuss here is how to reach not just some "proficiency" in social navigation, but actual social excellence. We've collected research on how to be happy, on how to confront organizational problems, etc. I think it would be nice if we also collected data on how to be polite. How to make one's company agreeable and interesting. How to make oneself elegant and glamorous. How to get people to do what you want, and then thank you for it.
Some slight bits of this are approached by PUA methods, but those are very specific in goal and scope, and require a set of skills that can be far from adequate in other contexts (that, and flirting with any and everybody all the time is just creepy and makes you look like a supervillain).
Of course, at its core, social grace is nothing but "intelligent application of the Golden Rule". So, with insight and purpose, everything should be possible... But that's a pretty huge ideaspace, and in day-to-day interaction you often don't have that much time to figure our what to do. Of course, there's rote behavior, protocol, that allows you to free brainspace for what's actually important, but too much of that and it can become blatant.
So... anyone know any actual research on the subject? We can also use some armchair philosophy, it's not like we eschew creative individual thinking here, but some backed-by-evidence stuff is very nice to have.