Failure bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that failed to make it past some selection process and overlooking those that did, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of

selection bias Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby failing to ensure that the sample obtained is representative of the population inte ...

. In several of these cases, one measure of success is precisely the lack of

public awareness In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichke ...

of people or things that are undergoing such selection process, which means that, in the possibility that there is at least one agent who is interested in the success of the people or things that are going through the selection process, the agent(s) will be interested into keeping the subject out of the public eye, and thus, to raise the likelihood of the failure bias happening

Examples

Espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering, as a subfield of the intelligence field, is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence). A person who commits espionage on a mission-specific contract is called an ...

* Most

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definiti ...

s fit into this category *

Censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governmen ...

Examples

See also