What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) describes the human bias of making decisions based on the information you have, without considering the information you’re missing. If you want an example of WYSIATI, look no further than Baby Mozart.
For those of you in Gen Z who may not know what I’m talking about, this phenomenon began in 1993 when a very small study was conducted at the University of California, Irvine. When 36 students were asked to take a spatial-reasoning test after listening to Mozart, a relaxation tape, or nothing, the Mozart listeners (a whole 12 people) scored slightly higher.
Every subsequent study debunked the original. Listening to Mozart had no impact on test-taking, IQ, or (who made this jump?) fetal development. But it didn’t matter. In the words of When Harry Met Sally, “it was already out there.”
The Baby Einstein franchise released its Baby Mozart video series in 1998. Pregnant women were wearing headphones on their stomachs. Parents plopped their infants in front of screens where puppets and classical music were promised to boost brain development and make their babies smarter. The franchise ultimately made over $1 billion in revenue.
Because of one study. Because of 12 students. Because what you see is all there is.
WHAT IS WYSIATI?
The phrase “what you see is all there is” was coined by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman describes two systems in the brain (which he explains are not actual systems but ways to understand what’s happening or, as he eloquently states in an interview, “expository fictions”).
System 1 is in charge of most things—it’s effortless and automatic. 2 + 2? System 1. Most conversation? System 1. Making sense of what’s around you? System 1. The harder work is done by System 2. Complex math equations? System 2. Doing your taxes? System 2.
System 2 takes a lot more energy, and we, like all life forms, are designed to conserve it, which is why we largely rely on System 1. Plus, System 1 is good at quick decision-making, which has served us well in our survival as a species.
System 1 is confident and decisive. It doesn’t wait around for more data. In fact, the less it knows, the easier it is to construct a coherent story. It takes the available information and puts together a narrative. It connects the dots. It assumes correlation does equal causation.
It relies heavily on the recent, frequent, negative, and extreme because that’s what our brains have evolved to pay attention to. Kahneman puts it this way—“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
FIGHTING WYSIATI
Once you understand how System 1 works, it’s easy to see how it can get us into trouble. WYSIATI is a prime example of that. Think about a time when you read a popular article about something you’re an expert on.
You likely didn’t agree with everything in the article, and you most certainly found some mistakes. Now think about reading a popular article about a subject you know little about. You didn’t find any mistakes. You assume it got everything right. And this is how we go through life!
I just heard a fascinating podcast that talked about the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks that inspired Peter Benchley to write JAWS. It was fascinating, and I will tell anyone who’ll listen (I’m doing it right now).
The great white shark even swam into a coastal creek and killed several people. I’m pretty much an expert on the topic now because I listened to one episode of a podcast by someone who’s probably not a historian or a shark expert.
This is how we go through life.
So, what are we supposed to do? Just as we can’t survive if everything in our lives were salient, we can’t go through life constantly looking for every piece of information. But what if the stakes are high? What if the safety of an entire community or a project worth millions of dollars depends on it?
Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein created the Pre-Mortem Method of Risk Assessment for exactly such a scenario. You’ve done post-mortems in business. A project fails, or a customer churns, so you go back and look at what went wrong. Hindsight is 20-20, but pre-mortems allow you to have some of this hindsight up front.
Imagine you’ve developed a strategic plan for a project. You’ve thought of everything (or at least everything you know about). Now, imagine that the project failed. Come up with theories about why it failed.
Pre-mortems are a genius idea because they take advantage of the very bias you’re working against. Your brain wants to tell a story to explain what happened, and that’s what you’re letting it do; you’re just forcing it to consider assumptions that were made or pieces of information that were missing.
THE POT CALLING THE KETTLE AI
The WYSIATI phenomenon leads us to tell stories based on the information we have, and sometimes we extrapolate too far or oversimplify things. Where else have I seen that?
I find it ironic that we’re all up in arms when AI hallucinates, and yet that is what humans walk around doing all the time! Think about it. When AI is given incomplete information or poor-quality information, it will not say, “I don’t have the answer.” Instead, it makes up the most plausible story. And it doesn’t present the story with caveats—it states it confidently as fact.
Professor of cognitive psychology Brian Stone makes this connection in his Substack, The Cognitive Psychologist. He goes on to point out that, much like many of us humans, AI doesn’t even have access to the best research out there. No, most of that is in professional journals or behind paywalls.
Humans and AI search engines gather the information available, pretend that’s all there is, and come up with the best possible story to explain it. We both often overgeneralize and make tangential, unsubstantiated claims.
And if you disagree and take exception to being told you’re no better than a hallucinating AI bot, might I remind you that you or someone you know once played Mozart for a baby because of one poorly designed study. (And if you don’t know someone who did this, it’s because you were the baby listening to Mozart.)
All of our workshops are based on industrial-organizational and behavioral psychology. We’re at mastery@maestrogroup.co if you want to learn more.