Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

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Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is a nonfiction book by professors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. It was first published on 18 May 2021. The book concerns 'noise' in human judgment and decision-making. The authors define noise in human judgment as "undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem" and focus on the statistical properties and psychological perspectives of the issue. Examples they give include their own finding at an insurance company that the median premiums set by underwriters independently for the same five fictive customers varied by 55%, five times as much as expected by most underwriters and their executives. Another example is that two psychiatrists who independently diagnosed 426 state hospital patients agreed on which mental illness the patient suffered from only in half of the cases and a finding that French court judges were more lenient if it happened to be the defendant's birthday. Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein argue that noise in human...

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