Noise #3: Its Constituents, and Ways to Minimize it
What are the common sources of noise in decision making? Well, people have selective attention, and selective recall of the information, write the authors of Noise . Information is rarely coherent, it is often conflicting, and so people pick and drop parts. Therefore, what goes into the decision varies across individuals. People are different. Some are strict, others lenient; some are optimistic, others pessimistic. You get the idea. If that sounds like bias, you’re right – it is actually both . It’s noise too because different people have different biases. This is called “level noise” – different people have different base levels. People makes exceptions to their own rules. They also react differently if the same problem is presented in a different context. All these variations within the same person are called “pattern noise” . Within pattern noise, there is a subcategory called the “occasion noise” – the mood of the person can produce different de...