WYSIATI is an acronym for What You See Is All There Is, and it is linked to of 3 cognitive biases.
- Overconfidence: Rhetoric > Quality of Evidence
- Framing Effects: 90% Fat
- Base Rate Neglect: Steve is a meek and tidy soul (therefore, he is a librarian, not a farmer). See The Sin of Representativeness
The idea behind WYSIATI is that if a certain piece of information cannot be retrieved by you consciously or unconsciously, it might as well not exist. The brain seeks coherence – if it cannot find a good narrative because of complexity, it will find a shortcut towards a good narrative by simplifying. Since cognitive ease is necessary for you to believe anything, you must take this shortcut for practical reasons, otherwise, you will be unable to act.
Another word for WSIATI is the Availability Heuristic.
Think of all the different myths you’ve heard about the health benefits of certain “miracle” foods across you life. A safe bet you can make is that each time someone tells you about these benefits, they had only recently read an article or seen a social media post that reports some groundbreaking study that no one knows about. It is important to them, not because they have done a thorough investigation of all the conflicting evidence as well as the corroborating evidence of the claim – like this website. It is important to them, because it is the most recent thing they can remember.
Examples of the Availability Heuristic:
“He underestimates the risks of indoor pollution because there are few media stories on them. That’s an availability effect. He should look at the statistics.”
“She’s watching too many spy movies. She’s seeing conspiracies everywhere.”
The most influential studies of availability biases were done by Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein in Eugene. They carried out groundbreaking research on public perceptions of risks, including a survey to consider pairs of causes of death: diabetes and asthma, or stroke and accidents.
For each pair, the participants indicated the more frequent cause and estimated the ratio of the two frequencies. The judgements were compared to health statistics at the time. Here is a sample of these findings.
- Strokes cause around twice as many deaths than all accidents combined, but 80% of respondents judged accidental death to be more common.
- Tornadoes were seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter cause 20 times more deaths.
- Death by lightning was judged less likely than death from butlism even though it is 52 times more frequent.
- Death by disease is 18 times as likely as accidental death, but the two were judged about equally likely.
- Death by accidents was judged to be more than 300 times more likely than death by diabetes, but the true ratio is 1:4.
These estimates are warped by media coverage. And the coverage itself is biased toward novelty and destruction. Good news isn’t news worthy. The media don’t just shape what people care about, but are also shaped by it. It’s a two-way conversation. The media will never report on anything that no one cares about.
The media has learned that people’s attention can be caught by shocking headlines or unusual events (like botulism). Because these things attract a disproportionate amount of attention, people think they occur more frequently than they do. The world in our minds is not an accurate replica of reality.
“Our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.“
Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The Availability Cascade
A variation of the Availability Heuristic is the Availability Cascade – a self-sustaining chain of events that originate from media reports of a minor event and lead to mass hysteria and large-scale government action. The emotional reaction itself becomes a story itself, so that news becomes about the outrage that is caused by the original event, which prompts additional media coverage.
The cycle is sometimes accelerated by individuals or organizations who work to ensure the constant flow of worrying news – the media competes for attention-grabbing headlines to stay relevant, and remain profitable.
“This is an availability cascade: a nonevent that is inflated by the media and the public until it fills our tv screens and becomes all anyone is talking about.”
Thinking: Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman