Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

The Sunday Times bestseller

‘A monumental, gripping book … Outstanding’ Sunday Times

Wherever there is human judgement, 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

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.

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 judgements 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 judgements 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 judgements more than we think. With a few simple remedies, this groundbreaking book explores what we can do to make better ones.