Noise: The unwanted variability in human judgement

Two doctors treating identical patients can give different diagnoses, two judges in the same court can give different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Interviewers of job candidates can make widely different assessments of the same people. Even fingerprint examiners sometimes differ in deciding whether a print found at a crime scene matches a suspect. These same doctors, judges, interviewers or forensic examiners can male different decisions depending on whether it's morning or night, Monday or Friday. They're examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. Kathryn speaks to Olivier Sibony, a professor and writer who specialises in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes. He's the co-author of a book on this very subject, called Noise, along with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein.