For his entire life, Charles Moore sought to heed God’s call to change a broken world—fighting passionately for civil rights, helping the poor, and feeding the hungry. Until one day, in a desolate parking lot in Grand Saline, he decided he hadn’t done enough.
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to some false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.
Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence (correlation "proves" causality). For example, if three of the five students with the best college grades went to the same high school, that can lead one to believe that the high school must offer an excellent education when, in fact, it may be just a much larger school instead. This can be better understood by looking at the grades of all the other students from that high school, not just the ones who made the top-five selection process.
Another example of a distinct mode of survivorship bias would be thinking that an incident was not as dangerous as it was because everyone communicated with afterwards survived. Even if one knew that some people are dead, they would not have their voice to add to the conversation, leading to bias in the conversation.
Nostalgia is grounded in survivorship bias. Things weren't better back then, despite what you might think. Just the bad things from bad then didn't stick around.
The first time sociologist Mary de Young heard about QAnon, she thought: "Here we go again."
De Young spent her career studying moral panics — specifically, what became known as the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, when false accusations of the abuse of children in satanic rituals spread across the United States.
Decades later, echoes of that same fear had emerged in QAnon. The seemingly novel conspiracy theory has grown in far-right political circles since November 2017. Adherents of QAnon believe that a shadowy cabal kidnaps children, tortures them and uses their blood in satanic rituals. The alleged perpetrators in the QAnon conspiracy theory are Democratic politicians — not preschool teachers, as had been the case in the 1980s — but the accusations are eerily similar.
