Noise

A Flaw in Human Judgment

By: Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias.​

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.

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2021


* This audiobook contains a downloadable PDF which includes figures from the book.

Useful

Much more focused than Thinking Fast and Slow, but helpful in understanding individual and particularly group judgments and decision making.

a very important read

if you make decisions, you need to read this book. Kahneman's work is careful, thorough, and impactful.

unnecessarily long

Good research but I felt the chapters were unnecessarily long and I had to make an extra effort to stay focused.

Fantastic and eye-opening!

I can't get enough of this book. Truly a fun and enlightening journey rethinking pretty much everything I had taken for granted... from analyzing medical research to understanding WHY it is negotiation rules work as they do. At times it can seem bleak how noisy the scales and measures we use and believe in are, and you can get the sense that believing anything is foolish... but the author does take you back to seeing the power of understanding.

Need more pauses in the audio

I felt like I was listening to a contender in a speed reading competition. There were several thoughts that were clearly separate and should have been delineated by a .5-1 second pause but there was no pause whatsoever. This was an incredibly frustrating listening experience. I noticed this issue predominantly in chapters 7-8 but it is a theme throughout the book.

At chap 8 now and frustrated enough to drop a review before finishing. I will finish reading because the story is great.