What you see is all there is

Someone tells you a new colleague is “sharp and confident”. Before learning anything else, you already expect them to be good at the job.

Nothing was said about their honesty, experience or judgment, but the missing information doesn’t register as missing. Two adjectives feel like a complete picture, and the picture feels like enough to go on.

• Halo effect: a coherent impression of a person fills in the traits you haven’t observed.
• Overconfidence: a thin but consistent story can feel more convincing than a rich but messy one.
• Framing effects: the same facts, presented differently, produce different stories and so different choices.
• Base rate neglect: a vivid description of a case crowds out the statistics you weren’t shown.

The practical counter-question is “What would I need to know that I don’t?” Because WYSIATI works by making absent information invisible, the fix is to deliberately list what’s absent before judging.

Because it’s a broad principle rather than a specific, tested prediction, WYSIATI can be used to explain almost any judgment after the fact. That makes it a useful lens but weak as evidence: “that’s WYSIATI” doesn’t show that a particular judgment was actually biased.