Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

This ground-breaking investigation into why most people make poor decisions and strategies for mitigating them comes from the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and co-author of Nudge.​

Imagine if two physicians in the same city diagnose the same patients differently, or that two judges in the same courtroom sentence criminals to differing punishments. Assume, for example, that distinct restaurants receive different ratings from different food inspectors, or that a company's response to a customer complaint varies depending on which employee is in charge of that particular issue. Now imagine that based on whether it's Monday instead of Wednesday, or on whether it's morning or afternoon, the same doctor, judge, inspector, or corporate executive makes a different decision. These are instances of noise: differences in conclusions that ought to be the same.

In their book Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Cass R. Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony demonstrate how noise dramatically increases the likelihood of mistakes in a variety of domains, such as strategy, personnel selection, economic forecasting, law, medicine, police behavior, food safety, bail, and security checks at airports. Furthermore, despite the fact that noise is present whenever people make decisions, both individuals and organizations frequently fail to acknowledge the influence of chance on their decisions and actions.

Noise explains why and how humans are so prone to noise in judgment, drawing on the most recent discoveries in behavioral economics and psychology as well as the same kind of industrious, perceptive research that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers.