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. Wherever there is human judgment, there is noise. 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 judgments 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 judgments 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 judgments more than we think. With a few simple remedies, this groundbreaking book explores what we can do to make better ones.

Introduction: Two kinds of error --
Part I. Finding noise: Crime and noisy punishment ; A noisy system ; Singular decisions --
Part II. Your mind is a measuring instrument: Matters of judgment ; Measuring error ; The analysis of noise ; Occasion noise ; How groups amplify noise --
Part III. Noise in predictive judgment: Judgments and models ; Noiseless rules ; Objective ignorance ; The valley of the normal --
Part IV. How noise happens: Heuristics, biases, and noise ; The matching operation ; Scale ; Patterns ; The sources of noise --
Part V. Improving judgments: Better judges for better judgments ; Debiasing and decision hygiene ; Sequencing information in forensic science ; Selection and aggregation in forecasting ; Guidelines in medicine ; Defining the scale in performance ratings ; Structure in hiring ; The mediating assessments protocol --
Part VI. Optimal noise: The costs of noise reduction ; Dignity ; Rules or standards? --
Review and conclusion: Taking noise seriously --
Epilogue: A less noisy world --
Appendix A: How to conduct a noise audit --
Appendix B: A checklist for a decision observer --
Appendix C: Correcting predictions.

Discusses why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones by reducing the influence of "noise"--variables that can cause bias in decision making--and draws on examples in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, strategy, and personnel selection.