Survivorship Bias

Examples

• Books and articles about successful entrepreneurs often highlight college dropouts like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs, creating the impression that dropping out correlates with success. This ignores the vastly larger number of dropouts who didn't become billionaires.
• Engineers initially analyzed returning planes to determine where to add armor, noting where bullet holes clustered. Statistician Abraham Wald pointed out they should armor the areas showing no damage, as planes hit in those areas weren't surviving to return for analysis.
• "I woke up at 5 AM every day for a year and became successful" stories rarely account for people who tried the same routine without notable results—they simply don't write viral articles about their experiences.

All cognitive biases

• Confirmation Bias
• Availability Heuristic
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
• Anchoring Bias
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Negativity Bias
• Hindsight Bias
• Sunk Cost Fallacy
• In-Group Bias
• Optimism Bias
• Framing Effect
• Self-Serving Bias
• Halo Effect
• Recency Bias
• Survivorship Bias
• Implicit Bias