Narcissism vs. social signalling

It seems to me like the first two stages are simple enough that Jessica's treatment is an adequate formalization, insofar as the "market for lemons" model is well-understood. Can you say a bit more about how you'd expect additional formalization to help here?

It's in the transition from stage 2 to 3 and 4 that some modeling specific to this framework seems needed, to me.

We can imagine a world where job applicants can cheaply reveal information about themselves (e.g. programming ability), and can more expensively generate fake information that looks like true information (e.g. cheating on the programming ability test, making it look like they're good at programming). The employer, meanwhile, is doing a Bayesian evaluation of likely features given the revealed info (which may contain lies), to estimate the applicant's expected quality. We could also give the employer audit powers (paying some amount to see the ground truth of some applicant's trait).

This forms a game; each player's optimal strategy depends on the other's, and in particular the evaluator's Bayesian probabilities depend on the applicant's strategy (if they are likely to lie, then the info is less trustworthy, and it's more profitable to audit).

I would not be surprised if this model is already in the literature somewhere. Ben mentioned the costly signalling literature, which seems relevant.

Fine to refer to this in a question, in any case.

I can't think of a clear thing to point to in the text - I think he's more concerned with describing what's happening than modeling its historical causes.

I can guess on my own account - I think the commodification of human life, rapid pace of change with respect to economic roles, and rise of mass-media advertising in the mid 20C accelerated a force already latent in American culture. But that's my guess. TLP is more empirical.

Yes.

I don't believe humans are badly modeled as single agents. Rather, they are single agents that have communicative and performative aspects to their cognition and behavior. See: The Elephant In The Brain, Player vs Character.

If you have strong reason to think "single agent communicating and doing performances" is a bad model, that would be interesting.

In this case, "convincing yourself" is clearly motivated. It doesn't make sense as a random interaction between two subagents (otherwise, why aren't people just as likely to try to convince themselves they have bad qualities?); whatever interaction there is has been orchestrated by some agentic process. Look at the result, and ask who wanted it.

The academic term for the Bayesian part is Bayesian Brain. Also see The Elephant In The Brain. The model itself (humans as singular agents doing performances) has some amount of empirical evidence (note, revealed preference models deductively imply performativity), and is (in my view) the most parsimonious. I haven't seen empirical evidence specific to its application to narcissism, though.