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Heuristic
A phrase that Kahneman uses, often in acronym form, to discuss the principle that people are often biased by information that is presented to them, because they assume that this information is all that is needed to make a decision. It is a flaw in our thinking, because it fails to allow for the possibility that necessary evidence might be missing when we are making a judgment.
What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) Quotes in Thinking, Fast and Slow
The Thinking, Fast and Slow quotes below are all either spoken by What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) or refer to What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1, Chapter 7 Quotes
We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.
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In a chapter devoted to demonstrating how our minds automatically jump to conclusions, Kahneman refers to a study in which people who only heard one side of a court case believed that side of the court case and were far more confident in their judgment than those who had heard both sides. This is due to a phenomenon that Kahneman calls “What you see is all there is” (WYSIATI). This means that the evidence that is in front of us is the sole evidence that we use to make judgments, without considering the possibility that we might need outside information. Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor as
Part 2, Chapter 13 Quotes
The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy.
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Kahneman speaks about the availability bias—which reasons that we estimate frequency of an event based on our ability to come up with examples of that thing—in terms of risk and judgment. A team led by Paul Slovic asked people to estimate various causes of death, and often people would overestimate causes of death that were, as Kahneman explains here, covered more often by the media—which itself bases its coverage on different, interesting, and poignant events. Thus, we are readily influenced by the media because we are overconfident in the things that we have personally seen or heard about (this also Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis.
Part 4, Chapter 30 Quotes
You read that “a vaccine that protects children from a fatal disease carries a 0.001% risk of permanent disability.” The risk appears small. Now consider another description of the same risk: “One of 100,000 vaccinated children will be permanently disabled.” The second statement does something to your mind that the first does not.
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Kahneman displays the difficulty that many people have with statistics, and particularly with a concept he calls “denominator neglect.” This bias ignores the base-rate in frequency and instead focuses on individuals, as in this example. When the statistic is communicated not in terms of percentages but instead in terms of concrete amounts, the 99,999 children who are unaffected by the vaccine become relatively unimportant: instead, people focus on the single child that is affected. The second example arouses our emotions much more than the first, because we find stories (and the images that our minds conjure) to be much more Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta imped
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What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) Term Timeline in Thinking, Fast and Slow
The timeline below shows where the term What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) appears in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1, Chapter 7
Kahneman next introduces a principle, which he terms “What You See Is All There Is” (WYSIATI). If we are asked whether a person will be a good leader and are told...
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WYSIATI implies that neither the quality nor the quantity of the evidence counts for much. The...
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WYSIATI also accounts for framing effects. The statement that “the odds of survival one month after...
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Lastly, WYSIATI accounts for what Kahneman calls “base-rate neglect.” Kahneman briefly describes a fictional man named Steve...
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Part 1, Chapter 9
...one for which they had already calculated their answer. This is also an example of WYSIATI. The present state of mind looms very large when people evaluate happiness.
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...creating patterns of ideas, inferring causes, exaggerating consistency (the halo effect), focusing on existing evidence (WYSIATI), matching intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness), computing more than intended, substituting easy questions...
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