What you see is all there is

What it is

Kahneman's phrase for building the most coherent story from whatever information is at hand, without asking what is missing.

Related

• Confirmation bias bias
  Working only with the information at hand tends to confirm the first story that comes to mind.
• Overconfidence effect bias
  A coherent story built from limited information breeds confidence, which has little to do with how complete the information is.
• Halo effect bias
  Judging the whole from what is visible, such as one good trait, makes the halo.

Appears in

• Kahneman and Tversky's heuristics and biases#6: What you see is all there is

References

• Wikipedia: What you see is all there is en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “What it means: finding patterns and stories”