Failure Bias

Failure bias is the logical error of focusing attention on the people or things that failed to make it through some selection process while overlooking those that succeeded, typically because the people or things that succeeded are, for that very reason, less visible to an outside observer. Researchers classify failure bias as a form of selection bias capable of producing misleading conclusions, and note that in certain domains, genuine success actually depends on staying out of public view; when the people or organizations involved have a real interest in something's success remaining hidden, that interest itself increases the odds that only the failures will be visible enough to study, paradoxically making the bias worse the more successful the hidden efforts actually are. Espionage and censorship are given as the two examples of settings where failure bias operates in this way, and the concept is closely related to the broader ideas of selection bias, cherry picking and survivorship bias, the last of which describes essentially the mirror-image error of focusing only on visible successes.