survivorship bias
survivorship bias noun: 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.
Noun
survivorship bias (countable and uncountable, plural survivorship biases)
- 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.
- 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.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
Forms of survivorship bias
| plural | survivorship biases |
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Questions about survivorship bias
- What does survivorship bias mean?
- Survivorship bias means 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.
- What part of speech is survivorship bias?
- Survivorship bias is a noun.
- What is the plural of survivorship bias?
- The plural of survivorship bias is survivorship biases.
Words near survivorship bias in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: survivorship bias (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “survivorship bias.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/survivorship_bias. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.