Google "signaling theory" and you get links for its use in economics and sociology with this brief explanation:
Signaling theory is useful for describing behavior when two parties (individuals or organizations) have access to different information. Typically, one party, the sender, must choose whether and how to communicate (or signal) that information, and the other party, the receiver, must choose how to interpret the signal.
I see it used fairly often on the Marginal Revolution blog, which raised my curiosity and triggered a line of thought. One of its uses relates to higher education; the idea being that education is important for the signal it gives to potential employers and others, not so much for the actual learning which may or may not have happened, but for the fact the person got into a college and got through the college, something of a rite of passage.
Some of the people with whom I worked in ASCS/FSA hadn't gone to college, and I've often thought about what differentiated them from the people who did have college. I don't think it was intelligence so much as self-confidence. By graduating from college a person learns about herself, signals to herself that she can surmount some obstacles of a certain difficulty. That signaling is in addition to the signals sent to others. I suspect it can enable a feedback cycle. My co-workers who hadn't gone to college hadn't learned that about themselves, and didn't get the feedback from others.
Similar psychology works in other fields--my being drafted and spending 1 year, 11 months and 11 days in the USArmy showed me I could do things I hadn't been confident of before.
I'd encapsulate this as developing a sense of "mastery" in a field, which perhaps is the reverse side of the coin of "impostor syndrome".
