HarperCollins India presents From the global bestselling author of THINKING, FAST AND SLOW and the bestselling co-author of NUDGE a GROUNDBREAKING exploration of why we make bad judgements:NOISE Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein & Olivier Sibony Publishing on Tuesday 18th May 2021

jaseya.fazili@harpercollins.co.in | 9 April 2021

Wherever there is human judgment, there is noise.

 Judgements do not follow exact rules. A teacher uses judgment to grade an essay, but not to score a multiple-choice test. Many people earn a living by making professional judgments: executives and underwriters, coaches and doctors, lawyers and engineers.  The rest of us are affected by them as consumers, employees, students, patients, and citizens. Their quality has a huge and lasting impact on all of us. But what if they are flawed?

There is too much unwanted variability in human judgment.

                                              This is called NOISE.

Bias has until now been the star of the show when it comes to errors in decision making. Noise has been the bit player. This book restores the balance.

DID YOU KNOW…

• In 10% of X-rays, an image deemed normal by one doctor is deemed sig­nificantly abnormal by another
• Police officers show greater leniency towards offenders who have the same name as they do
• Calorie labels have far greater influence over us if they appear on the left of the item than on the right
• Doctors prescribe more drugs at the end of the day than at the beginning
• In meetings, people are more likely to agree than disagree with the person who speaks first
• Judicial sentences tend to be more severe in hot weather
• Stock market performance is affected by sunshine
• Fingerprint identification isn’t infallible
• We all HATE performance reviews – both the person doing the review and the person being reviewed. And they are largely pointless.

These are all examples of noise.

Most of us show noise neglect. Leading to unfairness, inefficiency, and reduced productivity, it pervades everything from medicine, law, public health and food safety to forensic science, bail verdicts, child protection, performance reviews and personnel selection. If we want better, more accurate outcomes for the things that matter we must recognize and reduce noise. It will save money, improve public safety and health, increase fairness, and prevent avoidable errors.

In NOISE, Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony explain this little-known phenomenon, why it happens so frequently, and explain how to counter it. Their findings are as fascinating as they are alarming.

Packed with new ideas, and drawing on the same kind of diligent, insightful research that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, NOISE explains how and why humans are so susceptible to failure in judgment — and what we can do about it.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, Professor of Public Affairs, the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and the National Medal of Freedom in 2013. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology, and the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. He is the author of New York Times bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

CASS R. SUNSTEIN is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, where he is founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. From 2013 to 2014, he served on President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. Winner of the 2018 Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, Sunstein is author of many articles and books, including two New York Times bestsellers: The World According to Star Wars and Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler). His other books include How Change Happens and Too Much Information. @casssunstein

OLIVIER SIBONY is an Affiliate Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University. Previously, he spent 25 years in the Paris and New York offices of McKinsey & Company, where he was a senior partner. Sibony’s research on improving the quality of strategic decision making has been featured in many publications, including Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He is a graduate of HEC Paris and hold a PhD from Paris Sciences et Lettres University.

PRAISE FOR NOISE

‘Noise may be the most important book I’ve read in more than a decade. A genuinely new idea so exceedingly important you will immediately put it into practice. A masterpiece.’

Angela Duckworth, author of Grit

‘Noise completes a trilogy that started with Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge. Together, they highlight what all leaders need to know to improve their own decisions, and more importantly, to improve decisions throughout their organizations’

Max H. Bazerman, author of Better, Not Perfect

‘In Noise, the authors brilliantly apply their unique and novel insights into the flaws in human judgment to every sphere of human endeavour….  a masterful achievement and a landmark in the field of psychology.’

Philip E. Tetlock, co-author of Superforecasting

‘The influence of Noise should be seismic, as it explores a fundamental yet grossly underestimated peril of human judgment. Deepening its must-read status, it provides accessible methods for reducing the decisional menace.’

Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

‘After reading Kahneman, one’s thinking about oneself—and one’s thinking about thinking—is permanently altered.’

Samantha Power

‘The gold standard for a behavioral science book is to offer novel insights, rigorous evidence, engaging writing, and practical applications.  It’s rare for a book to cover more than two of those bases, but NOISE rounds all four—it’s a home run.  Get ready for some of the world’s greatest minds to help you rethink how you evaluate people, make decisions, and solve problems.’

Adam Grant, author of Think Again

About HarperCollins Publishers India

HarperCollins Publishers India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Litrature Live Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India has been awarded the Publisher of the Year Award three times: at Publishing Next in 2015, and at Tata Literature Live! in 2016 and 2018.

HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Egmont, Oneworld, Harvard University Press, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet.

For more information please contact

jaseya.fazili@harpercollins.co.in