Michael Chwe, a game theorist at UCLA, just wrote a book on Jane Austin. It combines game theory and social signaling, so it looks like it’ll be on the LW interest spectrum:
Austen’s clueless people focus on numbers, visual detail, decontextualized literal meaning, and social status. These traits are commonly shared by people on the autistic spectrum; thus Austen suggests an explanation for cluelessness based on individual personality traits. Another of Austen’s explanations for cluelessness is that not having to take
another person’s perspective is a mark of social superiority over that person. Thus a superior remains clueless about an inferior to sustain the status difference, even though this prevents him from realizing how the inferior is manipulating him.
A later expansion on that gives a list of biases to avoid, including the typical mind fallacy and a few new ones:
Austen gives five explanations for cluelessness, the conspicuous absence of strategic thinking. First, Austen suggests
that cluelessness can result from a lack of natural ability: her clueless people have several personality traits (a fixation with numeracy, visual detail, literality, and social status) often associated with autistic spectrum disorders. Second, if you don’t know much about another person, it is difficult to put yourself into his mind; thus cluelessness can result from social distance, for example between man and woman, married and unmarried, or young and old. Third, cluelessness can result from excessive self-reference, for example thinking that if you do not like something, no one else does either. Fourth, cluelessness can result from status differences: superiors are not supposed to enter into the minds of inferiors, and this is in fact a mark or privilege of higher status. Fifth, sometimes presuming to know another’s mind actually works: if you can make another person desire you, for example, then his prior motivations truly don’t matter.
Michael Chwe, a game theorist at UCLA, just wrote a book on Jane Austin. It combines game theory and social signaling, so it looks like it’ll be on the LW interest spectrum:
A later expansion on that gives a list of biases to avoid, including the typical mind fallacy and a few new ones: