Survivorship bias: what is this cognitive shortcut?

People tend to pay more attention to successes than failures.. In one way or another, this helps us protect self-esteem and self-concept. However, this tendency can lead to a cognitive bias, known as survivorship bias.

This bias is the consequence of advances or successes being more salient in the mind than failures or failures. Many times, without taking this bias into account, we draw hasty, optimistic and wrong conclusions. Let’s look at what implications survivorship bias has and some of the scenarios in which it can be easy to observe.

What is survivorship bias?

It is a selection bias that appears when a subgroup is confused with the entire group without taking into account that in the failure subgroup it is not visible or is more unlikely. The biased individual only considers the “surviving” observations, without considering those that did not survive. Ignore anything you haven’t earned, survived, or succeeded in.

In this bias, attention is focused on what has passed the selection process, overlooking what has not. This process of selecting survivors leads to the drawing of erroneous conclusions in which the perception or inclusion of the entire group is lost.

The above can lead us to an illusory or unjustified optimism, since when evaluating the group or the situation, taking into account only the cases in which they have survived, Not all the data is being taken into account.

Examples of survivorship bias

Examples of this bias are varied and notable. Let’s look at some.

Imagine that you organize a race with several people and when it ends, you assume that the first three people who crossed the finish line are the best. However, have you analyzed why others have not won? A cramp, an injury or the shoes are factors that may have prevented the best from really winning.

By staying with only the three champions, you can fall into survival bias, thinking that they are the best without discussion. If you want this hypothesis to be really solid, you could do a deeper analysis of the characteristics, not only of the champions, but also of the losers, and from this analysis conclude whether or not they are the best.

Another example of this bias occurs when language institutes highlight those students who have learned a language and have obtained good results in international tests, but leave out those who failed to learn it and did not obtain good results in the tests.

We can also observe survivorship bias when cosmetics companies survey their customers about one of their products, leaving out those who are not customers.

What are your causes?

We have seen that survivorship bias It is a selection error, a cognitive shortcut that can lead us to erroneous conclusions. But what causes it?

Its causes can be attributed to a misunderstanding between a cause and an effect, in particular. While it is true that both correlation and causation can exist together, Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. When we talk about causation, we are referring to cases where action A causes B, while correlation is simply a relationship.

Survivorship bias causes us to confuse both concepts and believe that correlation is the cause. The simple fact that we observe a pattern in a set of data leads us to look for a cause and begin to base reasoning on it, such as the example of the race, in which those who arrived first (effect) were considered the best runners. (cause), without taking into account the losers.

This bias makes us believe that the correlation “being the best runner” and “arriving first” is causation. But this is not necessarily the case, since it could happen that the best runner lost because he had a cramp during the race that prevented him from running well. To sum up, Survivorship bias is a product of a misunderstanding of cause and effect.

How to prevent this bias?

To avoid survivorship bias, we would do well to work with representative data samples. Another way in which we can confront this bias is with the strategy of debiasing: ability to reduce cognitive biases. To apply it we must do the following:

Become aware of the dynamics of the biases (survival bias) that our mind incurs. Commit to change and exercise greater control over our thoughts. Determine when or under what circumstances survival bias appears. Plan a strategy that helps us combat or prevent the appearance of bias. Apply strategies to prevent bias daily.

In conclusion, we can say that survivorship bias leads us down the path of easy inferences. Making a conclusion about something or someone based on successes or survival is an error that occurs by omitting data from the other portion of the sample: failures or non-survivors.

Fortunately, we can apply different strategies to combat this bias and prevent it from leading us down the wrong path.

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