Daniel Kahneman is the preeminent authority on decision-making. His work identifying the heuristics we employ in the face of uncertainty laid the foundations upon which behavioural economics was built, and his million-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, changed how people think about how people think.
No one has done more to unearth the foibles of human thought processes than Kahneman, and after almost half a century the Nobel-Prize winner is still going. Kahneman’s latest book, which he wrote with professors Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein (co-author of Nudge), lifts the lid on a collective delusion that plagues even our most trusted institutions and organisations.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment describes the problem of unwanted variability in decision-making, ie, ‘noise’. Every day, doctors, judges, forensic scientists and other highly trained professionals make decisions that we assume are based on reason and experience. And yet, the scale of disagreement between members of the same profession when asked to assess the same problem – and even when the same person assesses the same problem at different times – is shown in this book to be scandalously high.
Contagious spoke with Kahneman and Sibony to learn more about an endemic problem in human decision-making that has been left largely unexplored until now, and to find out how you can ensure that your decisions are not overcome by noise.
