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CEOs make mistakes due to their own psychological biases – but they also profit from the biases of others. Some exploit investors by catering to sentiment – adding “.com” to their name during the Internet bubble or entering “hot” industries to inflate their valuations.
From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel.
In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.
Nurse Ratched is the evil nurse in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). She is the Evil Woman as autocratic, the absolute power in a psychiatric ward, which is the ultimate “total institution”.
We often think that leaders are particularly strong in decision making – that’s why they’ve made it to the top. But evidence shows that even senior executives are prone to psychological biases, such as overconfidence, groupthink, and applying one-size-fits-all rules.
Cinema’s original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises.
Canons of taste and value in other media, such as literature, art and music, have been challenged in recent decades by proponents of sexual and ethnic equality.