Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is an excellent book. But if you’re a reader of business books, Noise may not be the book for you. Most business books get right to practical applications of the author/s key ideas. This book does not. It’s an academic book with business applications. The big question is whether this book is worth your time as a business reader.
The first two thirds of the book set up the later chapters. The later chapters cover many specific techniques you can use to reduce noise and improve judgement and prediction. Don't jump right to them, though. The early part of the book lays the necessary groundwork for you to understand why the techniques work. Later I’ll identify chapters with particular value for business readers.
Noise is about two things that affect our judgment. Bias is systematic deviation. Noise is random scatter. We need to understand both to improve judgment. Alas, most of the time noise hardly gets any consideration while bias is the star of the show. The authors wrote this book to “redress the balance.”
They say that the key theme of the book is: “wherever there is judgment there is noise --and more of it than you think.”
The book is divided into six parts. Part one is about the difference between noise and bias. Part two is about human judgment. Part three is about predictive judgment. Part four describes the psychological causes of noise. Part five explores several practical issues. This is the part that would be of greatest interest to most business readers. Part six wraps up the book with techniques for measuring and overcoming noise.
There’s a lot of actionable value for businesspeople, but as I said earlier, you need to read the first two thirds of the book to get to it. Here are some things that may make the book worth your time.
This is an excellent overview of structured decision processes and why they often improve judgment. There are also specific chapters you may find interesting and helpful.
Chapter 23 is “Defining the Scale in Performance Ratings.” Some research indicates that performance only has a 20 percent impact on the final performance evaluation. This chapter includes techniques you can use to reduce both bias and noise and make your evaluations fairer and more consistent.
Chapter 24 is “Structure in Hiring.” Hiring almost always involves at least one interview. And interviewers make subjective judgments about the person they interview. We know that humans aren’t very good at sussing out whether a particular person will succeed or fail on the job. We know that different interviewers often have wildly varying assessments of the same candidate. This chapter will give you some tools for improving the results of your interviews.
Chapter 25 is “The Mediating Assessments Protocol.” This has special value for you if you are a maker of deals and subject to what has been called “deal heat.” The mediating assessment protocol is a tool for overcoming deal heat and making better decisions.
Chapter 28 is “Rules or Standards?” I never thought about the difference between these two until I read this chapter. You learn how rules and standards affect the amount of judgment in particular situations.
In a Nutshell
Noise is an excellent book about improving our judgment by reducing scattered results (noise) and reducing inconsistencies in the decision process. The first two thirds of the book establish the definitions and principles for dealing with noise. The final third of the book has several chapters with practical applications of the principles.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Judgment can therefore be described as measurement in which the instrument is a human mind.Highlighted by 2,333 Kindle readers- A general property of noise is that you can recognize and measure it while knowing nothing about the target or bias.Highlighted by 2,240 Kindle readers
- System noise is inconsistency, and inconsistency damages the credibility of the system.Highlighted by 2,058 Kindle readers
"Noise" is the society-level sequel to the individual-focused "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
I'm writing this on the night of the release day. Amazon dropped off the book; I dropped everything and started reading. I will update this review after consequent readings of the book – this review is based on a careful reading of the first two parts, the conclusion, and a speed reading of the rest of the book. I do not hesitate to assign the book five stars already at this point and can't see docking any stars later on. This is a landmark book. Instead of listing the contents of the book here (use the "Look inside" feature instead!), I'll summarize my immediate takeaways after spending a few hours with the book. It is clear that Kahneman is looking at the problem space through a different lens than his magnum opus, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," which undoubtfully is also due to the influence of his co-authors. To emphasize this, the book is consistently narrated in the second person plural. A major early concern is distinguishing noise from bias – the latter having been the star of the show in most popular psychology literature, including the aforementioned book. The focus in "Noise" is societal, statistical, instead of the causal stories of individual biases, which we prefer as explanations in our primarily individualistic Western cultures. The first pages open with a delightfully insightful example of how to understand the difference between noise and bias (see the attached photos) that is immediately clear. The distinction is important, as is the realization that noise should be addressed first before bias is. Even if we don't know if we're aiming at the right thing, we need to narrow down the scatter pattern first. Counterintuitive perhaps but true: this strategy gives us a faster, more accurate way of actually hitting our target once the adjustments are made. "Noise is the unwarranted variability of judgments, and there is too much of it." Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein are sounding an alarm. Noise is so pervasive that it is difficult to spot. We've learned to live with it, too much, and it is costing us and our institutions dearly. Noise is too often thought of as random errors that will cancel each other out, but that is not helpful. Indeed, it is a societal problem: if one judge over-sentences and another is overly lenient, there is no "averaging out" – there is human tragedy and failure of justice. To drive this point home, the book serves well-sourced and engaging narrative examples from criminal law, medicine, prediction, recruiting, forensic science, financial forecasting, patent law, education, insurance sales, and many more fields. This is not a book to take lightly, though it is an easy read thanks to its excellent structure and perfectly balanced prose. I can only wish it will be read extremely widely, and its findings and recommendations will be rapidly put into use.
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2021
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2025
Top reviews from other countries
- Paul CampbellReviewed in Australia on February 4, 2023
5 * because it is a fascinating topic. it’s a hard read
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SbReviewed in the Netherlands on March 13, 2025
Heel erg interessant onderzoek, lastig door te lezen / uitlezen.
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