Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Conversation with Olivier Sibony, Professor of Strategy (Education Track) at HEC Paris and Associate Fellow of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, about his new book, New York Times bestseller, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.
Introduction by Natacha Valla, Dean of the School of Management and Innovation, Sciences Po.
Moderation by Darren Frey, Lecturer at Sciences Po and Director of Ensemble Insight.
Co-written with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein, Noise explores a surprising but prevalent phenomenon in decision-making contexts: the tendency to find inconsistency where one might otherwise expect uniformity.
Consider legal pronouncements rendered by judges on similar cases. One might anticipate a certain level of variability between judgments, but the authors catalogue countless instances of differences so severe that even the “rule of law” ends up seeming like a lottery in many cases, with life and death outcomes often driven by the arbitrariness of personality and circumstance. Even in situations in which judges are asked to evaluate identical cases, the level of inconsistency between professional judgments is alarming.
Moreover, this tendency extends well beyond the legal context. Sibony and his coauthors elaborate on the causes and consequences of decision-making noise in situations ranging from hiring practices to cancer diagnoses. In the authors’ terms, “wherever there is judgement, there is noise, and more of it than you think.” However, the situation is not as dire as it might first seem because there are ways to both counter and make use of this noise, as Sibony will illustrate while drawing on his decades of experience in consulting.
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© Coverbook Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.