If you could review all your past personnel decisions over the years, how do you think you performed? In Noise, authors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein ponder such questions and identify key factors in human judgment. In this case, they warn against a bias of overconfidence and an underestimation of uncertainty. And their conclusion as to personnel decisions should come as no surprise—our predictions are quite poor. The book title references the authors’ term that is used to differentiate between one factor to which we have learned to attribute error (bias) and all the others (noise).
