Regarding the "due date" excuses
Two common policies at my school:
For recurring assignments/quizzes: your lowest one or two marks don't count, so you can afford to miss/fail a few for whatever medium-good reason you choose. Thus you decide what is "good enough" based on your own expectation.
If you want some grace time for an assignment, your excuse better cover the whole working period of the assignment. If you leave something to the last day, and then get sick, it's your own damn fault, that is to say: for assignments emergency excuses are invalid.
My interpretation it perhaps uninformed because I never asked for any grace about deadlines or marking during university.
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How about while drunk? One cares a bit less what people think, the urge to signal is weaker. But I wouldn't take this as a trustworthy mode of thought.
Also it seems that a sociopath would be more goal oriented, and only signal when it is beneficial in their own limited sense of the meaning of beneficial.
In situations where a lot is at stake I'd expect (my mental machinery anyway) to put ultimate success over signaling.
Maybe compare the personal finances of money managers to their portfolio? (Only in the case where that which they manage has similar goals, i.e. retirement funds.)
The Best and the Brightest (1972) - David Halberstam
from Wikipedia: The Best and the Brightest (1972) is an account by journalist David Halberstam of the origins of the Vietnam War. The focus of the book is on the foreign policy crafted by the academics and intellectuals who were in John F. Kennedy's administration, and the consequences of those policies in Vietnam.
One distinction made by the book is the difference between acting based on reasoning or based on principles. The men acting based on reasoning got good results, but in times of high stress or confusion they made bad decisions.
"That's something that's always struck me as odd about humanity. Our first response to someone's bad news is "I'm sorry", as though we feel that someone should take responsibility for all the $&#ed up randomness that goes on in this universe." -- Angels 2200
This quote is based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word sorry.
Strategy:
Implementation:
http://codepad.org/KEqxSa4j
Results: