Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

WHEREVER THERE IS HUMAN JUDGMENT, THERE IS NOISE

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients - or that two judges give different sentences to people who

have committed matching crimes. Now imagine that the same doctor or judge makes different decisions depending on whether it is Monday rather than Wednesday, or they haven't yet had lunch. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.

In this book, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein show how noise produces errors in many fields, including in medicine, law, public health, economic forecasting, forensic science, child protection, creative strategy, performance review and hiring.

We all make bad judgments more than we think. Packed with groundbreaking new ideas and drawing on the approaches that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge international bestsellers, Noise explains what limits our decisionmaking, and offers a practical route to improving the way we think.