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punitive intent have a retributive aspect,
The urge for retribution explains why attempted murder and murder are treated differently by the law and by juries; a would-be murderer who is lucky enough to miss his target will be punished less severely.
ratio scales.
“coherent arbitrariness.”
indications of ability and motivation but also of character weaknesses and mediocre achievement.
Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.
do you feel confident in a judgment? Two conditions must be satisfied: the story you believe must be comprehensively coherent, and there must be no attractive alternatives.
Comprehensive coherence
the illusion of agreement
We are not all highly confident all the time, but most of the time we are more confident than we should be.
pattern errors
pattern error and transient (occasion) error are independent and uncorrelated,
your stable pattern errors are unique to you.
no sharp discontinuity between stable pattern noise and the unstable variant that we call occasion noise. The main difference is whether a person’s unique sensitivity to some aspects of the case is itself permanent or transient. When the triggers of pattern noise are rooted in our personal experiences and values, we can expect the pattern to be stable, a reflection of our uniqueness.
Today, the dominant model of personality, the Big Five model, combines traits into five groupings (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, neuroticism),
A personality trait is understood as a predictor of actual behaviors.
behavior may be driven by personality, it is also strongly affected by situations.
What makes people unique and endlessly interesting is that this joining of personality and situation is not a mechanical, additive function. For example, the situations that trigger more or less aggression are not the same for all people. Even if Andrew and Brad are equally aggressive on average, they do not necessarily display equal aggressiveness in every context.
Cases are analogous to situations.
A person’s judgment of a particular problem is only moderately predictable from that person’s average level, just as specific behaviors are only moderately predictable from personality traits.
The uniqueness of personality is normally a cause for celebration, but this book is concerned with professional judgments, where variation is problematic and noise is error.
“You and I have interviewed the same candidate, and usually we are equally demanding interviewers. Yet we have completely different judgments. Where does this pattern noise come from?”
“The uniqueness of people’s personalities is what makes them capable of innovation and creativity, and simply interesting and exciting to be around. When it comes to judgment, however, that uniqueness is not an asset.”
FIGURE 16: Error, bias, and the components of noise
stable pattern noise is actually more significant than the other components of system noise.
here is what we know—and what we don’t.
Amazon Mechanical Turk, a site where individuals provide short-term services,
the quality of judgments made by participants who are paid to answer questions online is often substantially lower than in professional settings.
although the average of errors (the bias) and the variability of errors (the noise) play equivalent roles in the error equation, we think about them in profoundly different ways.
Explanations that appeal to error or to special flair are far more popular than they deserve to be, because important gambles of the past easily become acts of genius or folly when their outcome is known.
the fundamental attribution error is a strong tendency to assign blame or credit to agents for actions and outcomes that are better explained by luck or by objective circumstances.
A substantial body of research in psychology and behavioral economics has documented a long list of psychological biases: the planning fallacy, overconfidence, loss aversion, the endowment effect, the status quo bias, excessive discounting of the future (“present bias”), and many others—including, of course, biases for or against various categories of people.
Causally, noise is nowhere; statistically, it is everywhere.
In a noise audit, multiple individuals judge the same problems. Noise is the variability of these judgments.
There will be cases in which this variability can be attributed to incompetence:
there can be a large amount of noise even in the judgments of competent and well-trained professionals.
the most highly skilled will be both less noisy and less biased.
asking a designated decision observer to search for diagnostic signs that could indicate, in real time, that a group’s work is being affected by one or several familiar biases.
one of the most important noise-reduction strategies: aggregating multiple independent judgments. The “wisdom of crowds” principle
shared scale grounded in an outside view.
mediating assessments protocol, or MAP for short.
how to identify these better judges. Three things matter. Judgments are both less noisy and less biased when those who make them are well trained, are more intelligent, and have the right cognitive style. In other words: good judgments depend on what you know, how well you think, and how you think. Good judges tend to be experienced and smart, but they also tend to be actively open-minded and willing to learn from new information.
tautological
The confidence we have in these experts’ judgment is entirely based on the respect they enjoy from their peers. We call them respect-experts.
Their credibility depends on the respect of their students, peers, or clients.
What makes a respect-expert? Part of the answer is the existence of shared norms, or professional doctrine.
Shared norms give professionals a sense of which inputs should be taken into account and how to make and justify their final judgments.
Beyond a knowledge of shared norms, experience is necessary, too.
Another characteristic of respect-experts is their ability to make and explain their judgments with confidence. We tend to put more trust in people who trust themselves than we do in those who show their doubts. The confidence heuristic points to the fact that in a group, confident people have more weight than others,
Respect-experts excel at constructing coherent stories. Their experience enables them to recognize patterns, to reason by analogy with previous cases, and to form and confirm hypotheses quickly. They easily fit the facts they see into a coherent story that inspires confidence.
