Decision Hygiene
Updated 2026-08-02
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Decision hygiene is the set of preventive practices and protocols designed to reduce noise, meaning unwanted and largely random variability, in judgments and decisions. The term was popularized by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein in Noise. The analogy is to handwashing: hygiene does not cure a specific disease but lowers the rate of preventable error. Typical measures include independent judgments before discussion, structured scoring rubrics, anonymized input, and mechanical aggregation. It targets noise specifically, complementing rather than replacing debiasing.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Noise audit: ask how much two competent people would disagree on the same case. - Sequence design: collect independent judgments before any group discussion to prevent anchoring. - Process over flair: replace reliance on expert intuition with a standardized, repeatable procedure.
Anchor fast decisions
Decision error splits into bias, which is directional, and noise, which is random scatter around the same target. Debiasing addresses direction; only process design addresses scatter. Because noise is invisible in a single decision and shows up only across many, it survives unless it is deliberately engineered out through standardization, independent input, and aggregation, which average away idiosyncratic variation between judges and occasions.
MINIMUM ACTION
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