I've been having trouble expressing the seemingly paradoxical nature of many people in my (our?) field being both 'abstract' but also extremely 'concrete/litera

I've been having trouble expressing the seemingly paradoxical nature of many people in my (our?) field being both 'abstract' but also extremely 'concrete/literal' in their behavior (especially socially). It seems that many people I meet with occupations that involve a lot of abstraction (like programming) also have a tendency to try and abstract things that they perhaps should not. Conversation, discussion, etiquette, and so on, tend to suffer when too much generalization (or 'control) is applied to them in an effort to abstract them. That still doesn't really explain this phenomenon though. One could argue that it's quite possible to 'abstract' the social world: "being correct is often not the point of an interaction", "listening is valuable in itself, even if the subject matter is not always fascinating", and "imagine yourself in the position of the person you're talking to" are all simple rules that I see many people break. Perhaps it's to do with the context where such an abstraction is applied. Especially in the IT world we spend a lot of time being able to think about abstractions, whereas in a social setting we might have to internalize these abstractions more.