Last reviewed:
1934–2024
Israeli-American psychologist and 2002 Nobel prize winner in economics.
With Amos Tversky he mapped the predictable shortcuts and errors in human judgement, so we can notice when our fast thinking is leading us astray.
Cognitive biases
Practise this skillWhat you see is all there is (WYSIATI).
Some studies he cited in Thinking, Fast and Slow, especially on 'priming', failed to replicate, and he publicly accepted this in 2017.
Next time you form a quick opinion of someone, ask: what don't I know about them that could change my view?
Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American psychologist, born in 1934, died in 2024, and a Nobel laureate in economics for work done with Amos Tversky on judgement under uncertainty. He was not a philosopher on a faculty, and Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) is not a treatise in that sense. It is the book in which he set out System 1 and System 2, the abbreviation WYSIATI ('what you see is all there is'), the planning fallacy, and the claim that confidence often tracks the coherence of a story rather than the completeness of the evidence. Those ideas match entries already in this library's catalogue of biases. The links on his profile point there. Pages below are the 2011 Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, where a page is cited. He did not claim that people are stupid. He claimed that a fast system, useful and usually right, has systematic errors.
System 1 and System 2
Fast, automatic impressions, and slower attention that can check them. The fast system is not a villain. It is where the biases get their speed.
WYSIATI
What you see is all there is. The story is built from the evidence in hand, and missing evidence does not weigh what it should. One result he names is the halo effect.
Overconfidence
Confidence follows a coherent story and how easily it comes to mind, not a full count of the gaps.
The planning fallacy
Forecasts stick near the best case. The correction he urges is the outside view: how long similar work actually took.
“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”
Daniel Kahneman · Thinkers beyond philosophy
“I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is.”
Daniel Kahneman · Thinkers beyond philosophy
“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
Daniel Kahneman · Thinkers beyond philosophy
“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.”
Daniel Kahneman · Thinkers beyond philosophy
“Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios.”
Daniel Kahneman · Thinkers beyond philosophy
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
Daniel Kahneman · Thinkers beyond philosophy