Survivorship Bias: The Hidden Truth Behind Success, Failure, and Self-Preservation
By Katelyn Gardner
Jeff Bezos is a very successful man – so successful, in fact, that we often forget that he has made some pretty incredible mistakes. His company – Amazon, I’m sure you’ve heard of it – lost $170 million on something called the Amazon Fire Phone. He also lost roughly $169 million to a company called LivingSocial, failed to gain traction with something called Amazon Destinations, lost his stake of 50% in Pets.com when it shut down, was forced to permanently halt production of Amazon’s first AAA video game: Crucible… you get the point. What you don’t notice is the fact that most of us tend to forget that he failed in the first place, we overlook his mistakes because he is so incredibly successful. One may call this resilience, but it is actually attributed to a phenomena called “survivorship bias” – survivorship bias is defined as a mental shortcut that occurs when attention is focused solely on entities that have survived a selection process, and completely overlooking those that did not. Survivorship bias cannot only be applied to successes and failures, but also struggles such as mental illness, physical illness, and addiction.
Survivorship bias and resilience are very closely related, and scientists have discovered evidence that this may be an evolutionary tactic – though modernized. According to David Kent, some of us initially produce a selfish response, which is designed to make sure that we meet our individual needs. This is counterintuitive as humans are a very sociable species, and these factors help us feel fulfilled and accomplished – our history as humans has implicated that our best successes are indeed stemmed from cooperation with other members of our species. The quality of sociableness is an evolutionary quality that stemmed from cooperation in hunting efforts. It made much more sense that we travel in groups for safety, and to practice hunting one animal that could feed multiple people for a few days rather than traveling solo and risk injury or death for a miniscule meal (Kent, 2019). Though we no longer are forced to hunt for survival, our instincts have evolved to repurpose this response in a myriad of ways.
Imagine taking a test. You did not study for the test as you had very little time between work and your other classes. You knew the information that was supposed to be on the test, so you decide that the time you spent in class taking notes will be sufficient enough to get you a decent score on the test. Once you receive the test, you feel very confident in your responses and feel that it was almost too easy given how panicked everyone else was. After a few days go by, you receive your test and your grade. At the top of the paper, you see a large “D” in red ink. Your heart sinks, you really thought you had this test in the bag. This stinks. You mill over your grade a while longer, and you talk with your friends to see how they did, and everyone seems to have done much better than you. You begin to frantically check your grade to make sure that you will still pass the class, and you see that you have 110% in the class (you have extra credit to thank for that), and you feel a bit better. Even though I did fail the test, I still will have an A if I keep working. The panic leaves you, and even though you’re disappointed in yourself, you quickly move on and find your notebook and pencil to take notes on the lecture. You just experienced survivorship bias. You lived through an uncomfortable and upsetting situation, and your brain assisted you in letting those feelings go as quickly as they came. Survivorship bias in the context of memory allows us to process situations like this in a safe way. If you were to continue to mill over the test, you may not be able to take decent notes to assure your grade would remain an A – or maybe you wouldn’t even be able to take notes at all because your brain cannot stop thinking about what went wrong. Regardless of the possible outcome, your brain employs a self-preservation strategy that mitigates the potential negative effects you may experience from a traumatic event. This mechanism helps us recover quickly after a disturbing event; in this case, failing a test. Your brain chooses to focus on the good aspects of a scenario to promote self preservation, allowing you to forget or “let go” of the uncomfortable memory.
Survivorship bias does not only exist to bolster our ego’s when we make mistakes, but it is a self-preservation tactic that allows many of us to continue with our lives. Realizing how survivorship bias affects people allows us to truly understand what we can do to support those who are dealing with trauma.
References
Shaw, J. (2016). The Memory Illusion. London, Great Britain: Random House Books.
Kent, D. (2019, December 18). Survivorship bias in science: Is individual resilience the most important quality of a good scientist?. University Affairs. https://universityaffairs.ca/opinion/the-blackhole/survivorship-bias-in-science-is-individual-resilience-the-most-important-quality-of-a-good-scientist/
Survivorship bias: The tale of forgotten failures. Farnam Street. (2019, December 2). https://fs.blog/survivorship-bias/
Czeisler, M. É., Wiley, J. F., Czeisler, C. A., Rajaratnam, S. M. W., &Howard, M. E. (2021, May 26). Uncovering survivorship bias inlongitudinal mental health surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic: Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. Cambridge Core. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-psychiatric-sciences/article/uncovering-survivorship-bias-in-longitudinal-mental-health-surveys-during-the-covid19-pandemic/579D8517717288AD48682914FA35E116