Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

181 Survivorship Bias

The tendency to overemphasize things that survive a selection process.

The survivorship bias is a type of selection bias that occurs when conclusions are drawn based on a group that survived some selection process, ignoring the group that didn’t survive. The bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs about prospects for success and often leads people to infer causation from correlation. For example, many have observed that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college and conclude based on this that dropping out of college is the best path to becoming a successful entrepreneur. This analysis, of course, ignores the thousands of students who dropped out of college and did not achieve entrepreneurial ...