Unusual Request -- Curriculum Development

[bromion]

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I don't know if this is a good forum to be asking this question, but I am hoping someone here might be able to help me out.

I have looked into part-time psychology programs near where I live and have not been able to find a program that would help me accomplish my goals, so I am thinking about designing my own curriculum (solely for my own benefit), and I am hoping that some people here might be able to point me in the right direction.

I am a 2005 college graduate and currently work on Wall Street as an investment analyst, which is a role that regularly requires me to meet with executives from various companies during the investment decision making process. To be blunt, some of these people lie, and lie big. Besides crunching the numbers, a big part of my job is understanding who is trustworthy and who is not, and being able to evaluate a person's character quickly, accurately, and with limited information -- in other words, do they pass the gut check, and how much can you learn about them in a 1-2 hour meeting based upon the way they answer questions and carry themselves?

I would like some help finding good resources in the following areas:
- Character / personality analysis
- Fraud / lie / deception detection
- Reading body language
- Interview training / techniques on how to ferret out good information
- Voice pattern recognition or similar (for use over the phone)

I am familiar with the FACS (facial action coding system) line of products and am pursuing those, but I'm looking for additional supplements.

Thank you!

 

[erg923]

These are all things law enforcement officers and police detectives are trained in....with little empirical support behind many (but not all) of them I might add. I would check their curriculums more so than ours. I would also check out Paul Eckman's website.

In general though, I would be pretty cautious about so-called "intuitive impressions" and your perceived ability regarding any of these things with a 1-2 hour meeting. 1.) Literature demonstrates that experts are often no more, and sometimes less (due to internal biases) accurate than the lay person at a proclaimed judgement ability 2.) Many social psychology principles of bias and internal threat are present in this situation (too many to go into here) and people are notorious over confident in their conclusions.

From a truly scientific standpoint, the best bet would be to start with Meehls 1955 book Clinical vs. Actuarial Prediction. You're on Wall Street...you should be a fan of actuary tables, right?

 

[bromion]

Good reply, thanks. I had not thought of trying the law enforcement angle, but that makes sense. I am familiar with the Ekman material and believe strongly, from personal experience, that it works, although I would not use it as a stand alone method.

I just read a summary of Clinical vs. Actuarial Prediction, and do not think it would be helpful for what I am looking for. I do understand the importance of, and bias toward, empirically robust data in favor of "gut check" reactions, but it's not that simple on the Street for a couple of reasons:

1) This is not a lab where it's (relatively) easy to collect and scrub data to make sure you have a good data set to work with. In the investment world, you are provided with a limited amount of data, some of which is of questionable reliability (fraud happens).

2) Along the same lines, there is massive information asymmetry and an incentive for some managers to present information in a favorable light (dishonestly). A company has nearly unlimited data about its business and industry, but I can't get access to this without violating insider trading laws. So it's possible to look at the public data, but ultimately, the quality of the management team involved is always a substantial piece of the equation; getting a good read on the level of quality is very important. Additionally, stock prices immediately reflect all available information (primarily quantitative), so there is no way to get an edge over other investors by simply looking at the numbers.

3) Businesses are organic entities, not statistical models. Interestingly, from what I have seen, few businesses are actually run on the numbers -- these are people driven organizations that have distinct personalities that mirror their founders or chief executives, not mathematical models. It's hard to quantify the true future value of a business (but that's the game).

The intent of generating the best possible impression during a meeting is to find areas of weakness that require further evaluation, not to make a final conclusion. It seems somewhat self defeating not to take all possible sources of information into account during the decision process.

At any rate, good suggestions, thank you.

These are all things law enforcement officers and police detectives are trained in....with little empirical support behind many (but not all) of them I might add. I would check their curriculums more so than ours. I would also check out Paul Eckman's website.

In general though, I would be pretty cautious about so-called "intuitive impressions" and your perceived ability regarding any of these things with a 1-2 hour meeting. 1.) Literature demonstrates that experts are often no more, and sometimes less (due to internal biases) accurate than the lay person at a proclaimed judgement ability 2.) Many social psychology principles of bias and internal threat are present in this situation (too many to go into here) and people are notorious over confident in their conclusions.

From a truly scientific standpoint, the best bet would be to start with Meehls 1955 book Clinical vs. Actuarial Prediction. You're on Wall Street...you should be a fan of actuary tables, right?