In Kahnamen’s article “Don’t Blink! The Hazards of confidence”, he talks about different types of fallacies that lead us to believe certain things. A few of these cognitive fallacies include the illusion of validity, and WYSIATS. These fallacies tend to lead us to believe things that either we shouldn’t believe or that are not true. One example of this is being over confident. In the article, Kahneman talks about why we make bad judgments. 

A cognitive fallacy is something in your thinking that isn’t right. One type of cognitive fallacy is the illusion of validity. Within the article Kahnamen tells a story about when he was assigned to the army’s psychology branch when he had to help evaluate candidates for officer training. They had to observe the candidates to find ones that they thought would do good. They observed them while they completed a “leaderless group challenge”. The reasoning for choosing their candidates was that they seemed to perform well while completing this task. Kahnamen and his colleagues later discovered that they made a mistake in their choosing and that these were not the best they could have chosen. He states that their “forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not much.” (Kahnamen 1). This is an example of an illusion of validity because they overestimated themselves and later did not correct it. Kahnamen later found that his predictions were not correct but did not do anything about it. 

Another fallacy is WYSIATS (what you see is all there is). WYSIATI is when you believe something from only what you see such as meeting a new person. You are likely to judge them or create a story about them strictly based on what you see when you first meet them. I believe that is can cause problems and create a false judgement of someone in your head. This could make you believe things about people that are completely untrue.