‘People will get used to judgments being done by machines’

How would you feel if two judges imposed different sentences for the same offense? Or if two radiologists reached different diagnoses for the same x-ray? Or, even worse, if the same judge or the same doctor decided differently on similar cases, depending on their mood or fatigue? These variations in human judgment in very important areas are what Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have defined as "noise." The Princeton University professor of psychology and public affairs emeritus, founder of modern behavioral economics and author of the golden bible of business management consultants ("Thinking, Fast and Slow") synthesizes an analytical approach to this noise, the factors that make human judgment fickle, and suggests ways to reduce the errors we have come to regard as systemic ("Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment").

Speaking to...