Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Co-author Olivier Sibony is a French Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris who has taught at numerous prestigious European academic institutions. He also has 25 years of experience at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he became a Senior Partner. These days, Sibony moves between academic and business worlds, applying his academic research to advise business leaders on strategy and decision making.

Prior to his work with Kahneman and Sunstein on noise, Sibony authored the New York Times bestseller You’re About To Make a Terrible Mistake!: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them (2019), a book about cognitive bias, another detractor of good decision-making. His theory that business leaders should set decision-making structures in their organizations is a a prelude to the strategies proposed by Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.

Co-author Cass R. Sunstein is a professor of Economics and Law at Harvard, where he founded the Program On Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health. He won the Holberg Prize from the Norwegian Government in 2018 for his contribution to law and the humanities, and from 2009-2012 he served as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Sunstein became renowned for his book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008), co-written with Richard Thaler. His work on nudge theory, whereby he proposed that people’s environment should be designed to make positive choices easier, has had far-reaching impact and even influenced British and American politicians. The idea that leaders should put structures in place to encourage optimal behavior aligns with the theories of decision hygiene proposed in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.

Marvin Frankel was a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York. He was appointed a federal judge by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 and served until 1978. He is a key figure in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment owing to his campaign to reform sentencing laws. Frankel, “a passionate human rights advocate,” was outraged at the discrepancy between different judges’ sentences for people who had committed the same crime (23). He found the vagary of guidelines, such as for example, the one that sentenced federal bank robbery defendants to a prison term of up to 25 years, disgraceful, as “the same defendant in the same case could get widely different sentences depending on which judge got the case” (23). He thus proposed a “detailed profile or checklist of factors that would include, wherever possible, some form of numerical or other objective grading” (24). He felt that impersonal rules would be fairer than allowing judges the independence to make idiosyncratic judgments. The authors view Frankel’s desire to use computers in sentencing as an early proposition of replacing human judgment with algorithms. Frankel’s work contributed to the support of Edward M. Kennedy’s campaign for the successfully launched Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the 1987 guidelines that followed. While the guidelines were mandatory, they were not as radical as Frankel would have wished.

The authors consider that despite future oppositions to his sentencing guidelines, Frankel made an important first step in correcting unwanted variance in judgment. Although Frankel himself did not describe the reasons for this disparity as “noise,” his use of the term “arbitrary cruelties” with regard to the “inexplicable variations in sentencing” got to the heart of the problem identified by the authors (23).

Kate Stith is the Lafayette S. Foster Professor at Yale Law School and a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Her husband José A. Cabranes is a United States Circuit Judge and former federal judge who served between 1979 and 1994. Both Stith and Cabranes are fierce critics of sentencing reform, publishing the seminal work Fear of Judging: Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts (1998). Stith and Cabranes argued that for two centuries prior to sentencing reform, judges had been allowed to exercise their discretion. They believed that the new guidelines were hopelessly bureaucratic and impeded judges from exercising what they had long been trained to do. Their objections succeeded, and in 2005 the Supreme Court demoted the guidelines, making them advisory rather than compulsory. The authors believe that while Stith and Cabranes’ attack on Frankel’s guidelines was well-intentioned, their approach sacrifices accuracy in favor of considering particulars, thereby contributing to the unfair variance in sentences.