From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the co-author of Nudge, a groundbreaking exploration of why most people make bad judgments, and how to control for that noise.

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients - or that two judges in the same courthouse give different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different food inspectors give different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants - or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to be handling the particular complaint. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, or the same company official 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, Cass R. Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony show how noise contributes significantly to errors in all fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, police behavior, food safety, bail, security checks at airports, strategy, and personnel selection. And although noise can be found wherever people make judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike are commonly oblivious to the role of chance in their judgments and in their actions.

Drawing on the latest findings in psychology and behavioral economics, and the same kind of diligent, insightful research 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.

Auteur

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 is the author of New York Times bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. He lives in New York City.

OLIVIER SIBONY is an Affiliate Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University. Previously, he spent 25 years in the Paris and New York offices of McKinsey & Company, where he was a senior partner. Sibony's research on improving the quality of strategic decision making has been featured in many publications, including Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He is a graduate of HEC Paris and hold a PhD from Paris Sciences et Lettres University.

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?. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
@casssunstein