survivorship bias

English

Noun

survivorship bias (countable and uncountable, plural survivorship biases)

  1. A form of selection bias in which only the people or things that "survived" some process are considered, while those that did not are inadvertently overlooked because of their lack of visibility.
    • 2025 November 4, Thomas Kelly, “Debunking “When Prophecy Fails””, in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, volume 62, number 1, →DOI, →ISSN, page 3:
      Kelly argued that existing literature on cult survival often draws upon retrospective studies of religious groups which suffer from survivorship bias, as surviving cults are easier to observe than defunct cults.

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