Word.ws English Dictionary

survivorship biases

survivorship biases is the plural of survivorship bias.

Meaning of survivorship bias

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.
    • 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

Questions about survivorship biases

What is survivorship biases the plural of?
Survivorship biases is the plural of survivorship bias.

Words near survivorship biases in the dictionary

  1. survivoress
  2. survivoresses
  3. survivors
  4. survivorship
  5. survivorship bias
  6. survivorship biases
  7. survivorships
  8. survivour
  9. survivours
  10. survivress
  11. survivresses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: survivorship biases (page history and authors); 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 biases.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/survivorship_biases. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.