Concept
Decision Hygiene
Decision hygiene is a set of practices that reduce noise in judgment, such as independent assessments, structured judgments and the outside view, named by analogy with handwashing because it prevents errors no one can point to.
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein use the term in Noise for the remedies to unwanted variability in judgment. Like handwashing, decision hygiene works without showing which errors it prevented, which makes it easy to neglect. The book's principles are that the goal of judgment is accuracy, not individual expression; that judges should think statistically and take the outside view of similar cases; that judgments should be structured into independent tasks; that premature intuitions should be resisted; that independent judgments from several people should be obtained and then aggregated; and that relative judgments and relative scales are preferable to absolute ones. Information should also be sequenced, so that judges are not exposed early to irrelevant details or to others' conclusions. The authors acknowledge that noise reduction has costs, including rigidity and the feeling of being processed rather than heard.
A real-life example
Two partners at an architecture practice in Antalya price fee proposals and often reach very different figures for similar villas. They write a one-page routine: check five comparable past projects first, estimate hours, visits and risk separately, price alone and compare afterwards. When they re-price four old projects three months later, the gap between them has narrowed sharply.
How to use it
- 1Choose one recurring judgment that matters and write a one-page procedure for it: reference class, parts to score, who judges independently, and when views are shared.
- 2Collect individual judgments in writing before any discussion, and decide what information each judge sees and in what order.
- 3Re-run a small noise audit every few months to check whether the spread has narrowed.