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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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Daniel Kahneman (speaker)
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87
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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. This is both because our mental processes are inherently lazy, and because we are overconfident in the information that we already believe and have access to. This can lead to errors in various kinds of calculations, however, and by using the example of a court case, Kahneman demonstrates that these biases can have serious consequences.
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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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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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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