Course Description

Instructor: Shai Robkin

In their bestselling books Predictably Irrational, Thinking Fast and Slow, and Nudge, Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein (with co-author Richard Thaler), respectively, explore how cognitive biases lead individuals to make decisions that defy what we might call rational thinking. In their 2021 book Noise, Kahneman and Sunstein partner with Olivier Sibony, author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, to focus on undesired variabilities in judgements, by both individuals and organizations, when addressing the exact same problem. How is it that faced with the same patient, different doctors make different judgements about whether patients have skin cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis and a host of other conditions? How is it that whether an asylum seeker will be admitted into the United States depends on something like a lottery? Seemingly random and unfair decisions resulting from noise have dramatic implications for society, including the erosion of trust we have in one another. This course boils down the authors’ research to their layperson and entertaining essence, so that students need not plow through what is a somewhat dense but very important book.