Even when unfairness is only a minor concern, system noise poses another problem. People who are affected by evaluative judgments expect the values these judgments reflect to be those of the system, not of the individual judges. Something must have gone badly wrong if one customer, complaining of a defective laptop, gets fully reimbursed, and another gets a mere apology; or if one employee who has been with a firm for five years asks for a promotion and gets exactly that, while another employee, whose performance is otherwise identical, is politely turned down. System noise is inconsistency,
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