Noise: a flaw in human judgment
- London William Collins 2021
- ix, 454 p. ill. Includes bibliographical references and index
Table of contents
Part I. Finding noise: Crime and noisy punishment; A noisy system; Singular decision -- Part II. Your mind is a measuring instrument: Matters of judgment; Measuring error; The analysis of noise; Occasion noise; How groups amplify noise -- Part III. Noise in predictive judgment: Judgments and models; Noiseless rules; Objective ignorance; The valley of the normal -- Part IV. How noise happens: Heuristics, biases, and noise; The matching operation; Scale ; Patterns; The sources of noise -- Part V. Improving judgments: Better judges for better judgments; Debiasing and decision hygiene; Sequencing information in forensic science; Selection and aggregation in forecasting; Guidelines in medicine; Defining the scale in performance ratings; Structure in hiring; The mediating assessments protocol -- Part VI. Optimal noise: The costs of noise reduction; Dignity; Rules or standards?
From the world-leaders in strategic thinking and the multi-million copy bestselling authors of Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge, the next big book to change the way you think. Wherever there is human judgment, there is noise. ‘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 ‘An absolutely brilliant investigation of a massive societal problem that has been hiding in plain sight’ Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients – or that two judges in the same court give different sentences to people who have committed matching crimes. Now imagine that the same doctor and the same judge make different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday, or they haven’t yet had lunch. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, 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. And although noise can be found wherever people are making judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike commonly ignore its impact, at great cost. Packed with new ideas, and drawing on the same kind of sharp analysis and breadth of case study that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge international bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise and bias in decision-making. We all make bad judgments more than we think. With a few simple remedies, this groundbreaking book explores what we can do to make better ones.