Who knew Dr. Seuss was at the forefront of impression management research decades ahead of anyone else?

This children's book gets so much right about how people identify signals of status and affiliation. It highlights how the low status Sneetches strive to obtain high status signals (belly stars!) so they can be treated like high status sneecthes...how the star's status becomes polluted through affiliation with the lower status sneetches... and then subsequently how the high status sneecthes try to get rid of their formerly high status stars because they don't want to be mistaken for low status sneetches. Pure Brilliance.

Theory on how we purposefully are willing to pay a visible "cost" to demonstrate to discerning audiences that we are fit enough to incur these costs...

Alternate title: The evolutionary logic behind spraying 10,000€ bottles of champaign against a wall in the middle of a club

A good summary is here:

https://www.slideshare.net/anniemirza14/zahavis-handicap-principle

This brilliant book chronicles superstitious practices in management whose function is primarily 'magical'. Connections between "the shareholders" and "the gods", discussions of rain dances to reduce market uncertainty, classes and castes of professionals whose industry and roles have counterparts in churches and shamanistic communities, etc... Brilliant read all the way around to make you question whether half of what is done in management, forecasting, and strategic planning is a rain dance performance whose real value is making us more comfortable with the unknown future.

Brilliant evolutionary biologist who wrote the original forward to Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene' and is lauded as one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He's famous for his work on kinship theory, as well as animal communication, deception, and mimicry. This particular book lays out his theory of human self deception, arguing that humans have evolved to lie to themselves because this makes them better at deceiving others. Trivers is a master at providing examples from the animal world and showing how these apply to humans as well. Genius and harrowing as an exploration into how we actively deceive ourselves on a regular basis.

Great book by a Harvard psychologist that builds on the earlier work of Nikolaas Tinbergen, who wrote about a phenomena in the animal kingdom by which animals could be tricked to respond to a dummy object which had super exaggerated features of the original stimulus object. Examples include exaggerated shapes or colors.

This book by Deirdre Barrett builds on this and provides lots of examples of how humans are equally susceptible to "supernormal stimuli".

Overall this book further's the argument that, rather than taking in everything and measuring them in turn, we are predictably sensitive to specific cues/signals and that we disproportionately respond to them. Certain peacocking feathers are more influential on our decisions and reactions than others and understanding which feathers provoke the greatest response is important for any successful peacock...

In recent years there's been a fetishisation of 'failure resumes', or bragging about how one has failed. If this isn't the very essence of handicap theory in action, I don't know what is!

This class drills aspiring finance professionals on how to talk and act like expert forecasters, enabling them to forecast the future of the stock market both confidently and convincingly. It's is a staple class required to be inducted into CBS's honored & priestly 'value investing' caste. Overall a brilliant theater class and a must-take for any finance professionals who wants to learn the expert signals needed to portray expertise in predicting future stock prices.

CBS offers a semester long behavioural economics class that can be skipped by simply reading this book. It's a classic to get you excited by areas of judgment and decision making. It can get a bit theoretical at times, especially towards the middle, but the sections on happiness and well being towards the end are worth the wait.

Russel Ackoff's genius article that first got me interested in interpreting performances of management as little more than rain dances...

The magnum opus of one of the most renowned chroniclers of mythology in the world, this book teaches about formulaic story archs that transcend geographic and cultural boundaries.

A brilliant old school chronicle of the ways in which people visibly present themselves to others... Of particular interest is his discussion on 'creators' and 'inheritors.'

Contemporary analysis of it here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/24/the-naked-ape-at-50-desmond-morris-four-experts-assess-impact

Excellent program that starts with a review of Freud's nephew and the start of the modern PR industry...

For anyone navigating the grad school experience, or those close to them, this instagram page brilliantly captures the essence of the experience.

Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll first coined the term 'umwelt', which can be defined loosely as the perceptual world of a specific organism... Animals don't percieve and process everything in their environments and instead only perceive certain things... so their world is made up of just the unique stimuli which they can perceive and pay attention to.

After reading this work one could ask what's the umwelt for various social groups or professions... And specifically what are the status and social signals that they pay particular attention to (or ignore completely).

One issue faced by shamans, charlatans, and experts alike is how to deal with uncertain future events (whether it rains tomorrow, whether someone's health will recover, whether the market will go up)

In any domain of claimed "expertise" (predicting the weather, forecasting stock prices, foretelling natural disasters, etc) there is an element of luck. Sometimes it's all luck, other times less so...

One key skillset of the successful shaman, charlatan, or expert is that of convincing the audience that when things go well, it's because of the expert's magical power and ability... and that when things go badly, it's because of some outside eternal force that is outside of the control of the expert ("a witch!", "The market!", "the shareholders", "the reviewers").

Dealing with the audience comes in two stages... The first stage involves performances - the expert appears to do something that uses or invokes their power. The later stage then involves causal narratives that look at what happened (it rained or it didn't, the stock price went up or down, etc) and attribute credit to the shaman and blame to others. This two stage process: performance & narrative - is captured in this class taught at Columbia by one of the most famous living Anthropologists today.