Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

by Daniel Kahneman

People have a remarkable intuitive ability to match intensities across unrelated dimensions, by mapping one intensity scale onto another. You can match the intensity of your affection for different singers to the height of buildings in your city. (If you think that Bob Dylan is especially great, for example, you might match your level of enthusiasm for him to the tallest building in your city.) You could match the current level of political discord in your country to a summer temperature in a city you know well. (If there is remarkable political harmony, you might match it to a breezy seventy-degree summer day in New York.) And if you were asked to express your appreciation of a restaurant by comparing it to the length of a novel instead of the usual 1-to-5-star rating scale, this request would strike you as quite bizarre but not at all infeasible. (Your favorite restaurant might be like War and Peace.) In each case, it is—oddly—quite clear what you mean.