Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Overview

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the coauthor of Nudge, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones—"a tour de force” (New York Times). 

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients—or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants—or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
 
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.
 
Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment—and what we can do about it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316451390
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	33,164
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Daniel Kahneman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Kahneman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society.

​He has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology, and the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. He lives in New York City. He is the author of New York Times bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Olivier Sibony is a professor, writer and advisor specializing in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes. Sibony teaches Strategy, Decision Making and Problem Solving at HEC Paris. He is also an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School in Oxford University. Sibony's research centers on improving the quality of decision making by reducing the impact of behavioral biases. He is the author of numerous articles in academic and popular publications, including Before You Make That Big Decision, co-authored with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. From 2013 to 2014, he served on President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. From 2016 to 2017, he served on the Defense Innovation Board of the US Department of Defense. Sunstein is author of many articles and books, including two New York Times bestsellers: The World According to Star Wars and Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler). His other books include Republic.com, Risk and Reason, Why Societies Need Dissent, The Second Bill of Rights, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, The Ethics of Influence, and Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

@casssunstein

Table of Contents

Introduction: Two Kinds of Error 3

Part I Finding Noise 11

1 Crime and Noisy Punishment 13

2 A Noisy System 23

3 Singular Decisions 34

Part II Your Mind Is a Measuring Instrument 39

4 Matters of Judgment 43

5 Measuring Error 55

6 The Analysis of Noise 69

7 Occasion Noise 79

8 How Groups Amplify Noise 94

Part III Noise in Predictive Judgments 107

9 Judgments and Models 111

10 Noiseless Rules 123

11 Objective Ignorance 137

12 The Valley of the Normal 148

Part IV How Noise Happens 159

13 Heuristics, Biases, and Noise 161

14 The Matching Operation 176

15 Scales 187

16 Patterns 200

17 The Sources of Noise 210

Part V Improving Judgments 221

18 Better Judges for Better Judgments 225

19 Debiasing and Decision Hygiene 236

20 Sequencing Information in Forensic Science 245

21 Selection and Aggregation in Forecasting 259

22 Guidelines in Medicine 273

23 Denning the Scale in Performance Ratings 287

24 Structure in Hiring 300

25 The Mediating Assessments Protocol 312

Part VI Optimal Noise 325

26 The Costs of Noise Reduction 329

27 Dignity 339

28 Rules or Standards? 350

Review and Conclusion: Taking Noise Seriously 361

Epilogue: A Less Noisy World 377

Appendix A How to Conduct a Noise Audit 379

Appendix B A Checklist for a Decision Observer 386

Appendix C Correcting Predictions 389

Acknowledgments 395

Notes 397

Index 437

Editorial Reviews

03/15/2021

Psychology professor Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), business professor Sibony (You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!), and legal scholar Sunstein (Too Much Information) team up for this fascinating exploration of the bias and “noise” that cause errors in human judgment. Noise, they write, is “variability in judgments that should be identical” that, when combined with one’s own biases—conscious or not—can cause human error. The authors offer no shortage of noise-reduction strategies: “decision hygiene,” for example, involves sequencing information to cut back on the possibility of confirmation bias, a technique used in forensic science analyses, where examiners get “only the information they need when they need it.” The authors also suggest breaking down complex decisions into “multiple fact-based assessments”; avoiding group discussions, which increase noise, instead collecting individual opinions beforehand; and appointing a “decision observer” to identify bias. Though the writing can be jargon-heavy, readers will find plenty of insight and useful exercises. The result is dense and complex, but those who stay the course will be rewarded with an intricate examination of decision-making and sound judgment. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc. (May)

Publishers Weekly

The gold standard for a behavioral science book is to offer novel insights, rigorous evidence, engaging writing, and practical applications. It’s rare for a book to cover more than two of those bases, but Noise rounds all four—it’s a home run. Get ready for some of the world’s greatest minds to help you rethink how you evaluate people, make decisions, and solve problems.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

"Noise completes a trilogy that started with Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge. Together, they highlight what all leaders need to know to improve their own decisions, and more importantly, to improve decisions throughout their organizations. Noise reveals a critical lever for improving decisions, not captured in much of the existing behavioral economics literature. I encourage you to read Noise soon, before noise destroys more decisions in your organization."—Max H. Bazerman, author of Better, Not Perfect

“The influence of Noise should be seismic, as it explores a fundamental yet grossly underestimated peril of human judgment. Deepening its must-read status, it provides accessible methods for reducing the decisional menace.”—Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

“Choices matter. Unfortunately, many of the choices people make are fundamentally flawed by the presence of noise, the subject of this absolutely fascinating and essential book. It is deeply researched, thoughtful, and accessible. I began it with a sense of intrigue and concluded it with a sense of celebration. We can make better choices in business, politics, and our personal lives. This book lights the way.”—Rita McGrath, author of Seeing Around Corners

"Brilliant! Noise goes deep on an under-appreciated source of error in human judgment: randomness. The story of noise has lacked the charisma of the story of cognitive bias…until now. Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein bring noise to life, making a compelling case for why we should take random variation in human judgment as seriously as we do bias and offering practical solutions for reducing noise (and bias) in judgment."
 —Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets

"Noise may be the most important book I've read in more than a decade. A genuinely new idea so exceedingly important you will immediately put it into practice. A masterpiece."—Angela Duckworth, author of Grit

"In Noise, the authors brilliantly apply their unique and novel insights into the flaws in human judgment to every sphere of human endeavor: from moneyball coaches to central bankers to military commanders to heads of state. Noise is a masterful achievement and a landmark in the field of psychology."—Philip E. Tetlock, coauthor of Superforecasting

“The earth has been so fully explored that scientists can’t possibly discover a previously unknown mammal the size of an elephant. The same could be said about the landscape of decision-making, yet Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have discovered a problem as large as an elephant: noise. In this important book they show us why noise matters, why there’s so much more of it than we realize, and how to reduce it. Implementing their advice would give us more profitable businesses, healthier citizens, a fairer legal system, and happier lives.”—Jonathan Haidt, NYU Stern School of Business

"Noise is an absolutely brilliant investigation of a massive societal problem that has been hiding in plain sight."—Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

"A tour de force of scholarship and clear writing."—New York Times

“Well-researched, convincing and practical book . . . written by the all-star team . . . The details and evidence will satisfy rigorous and demanding readers, as will the multiple viewpoints it offers on noise. Every academic, policymaker, leader and consultant ought to read this book. People with the power and persistence required to apply the insights in Noise will make more humane and fair decisions, save lives, and prevent time, money and talent from going to waste.”—Robert Sutton, Washington Post

"Convincing...A humbling lesson in inaccuracy."—Financial Times

From the Publisher

2021-03-17
A sprawling study of errors in decision-making, some literal matters of life and death.

You go to a doctor complaining of chest pains. The doctor orders an angiogram. The hospital requires a second opinion before authorizing surgery, and the second doctor disagrees on the extent to which a specific blood vessel is blocked. These unpredictable disagreements over the same data are what Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein call “noise,” a species of human error that happens whenever such higher-order judgments are involved. Noise, they write, is rampant in medicine, where “different doctors make different judgments about whether patients have skin cancer, breast cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, depression, and a host of other conditions.” Noise is especially prevalent in psychiatry, they add, where subjective opinion is more pronounced than in other disciplines. A cousin of bias, noise is difficult to isolate and correct. In forensic science, the authors write, noise is implicated in nearly half of all misidentifications of perpetrators and wrongful imprisonments. Unlike some categories of error, noise is often not helped by the introduction of more information. Writing in often dense but generally nontechnical prose, the authors offer strategies for reducing noise. One is to average out predictions in, say, stock market performance, since “noise is inherently statistical.” Another is to consult the smartest people you can find; while they may not be flawless, “picking those with highest mental ability makes a lot of sense.” Since error combines with snap decisions, the authors endorse rigorous review and other strategies for noise reduction and “decision hygiene” as well as developing habits of mind that acknowledge both bias and error and favor examining the opinions of those with whom one disagrees as dispassionately and fairly as possible. “To improve the quality of our judgments,” they urge, “we need to overcome noise as well as bias.”

Abundant food for thought for professionals of all types as well as students of decision science and behavioral economics.

Kirkus Reviews