, Columnist
I Learned to Answer Emails From This Book About Primate Behavior
How fast you reply — and whether you respond at all — is about who’s more powerful than whom.
Always catching up, never caught up.
Photographer: Sarah Blesener/Bloomberg
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If you’re confronting an endless string of unread emails after a long weekend or summer vacation, try thinking of responding as a game. A status game.
Since reading the 2012 book Games Primates Play, by University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestripieri, I’ve never looked at my inbox the same way. Email, writes Maestripieri, is governed by the rules of dominance hierarchy, which is central to the games we social primates are wired to play.