Are you being caught out by survivor bias?
'I never wore a seatbelt when I was a child, and it never did me any harm', a staple of any nostalgic social media group.
Sadly of course, we don't hear from those who did come to harm! A classic bit of 'survival bias'.
My favourite, and I think the archetypal 'survivor bias' story, comes from World War II....
Engineers analysing bullet holes in returning aircraft to sought to reinforce the spots riddled with holes. A statistician, Abraham Wald, realised a serious flaw in this approach....the planes making it back had survived despite damage in those areas. The real danger came when the planes were hit in the areas WITHOUT hole such as the engines or cockpit; these planes didn't make it back.
We get caught out by survivor bias all the time: speaking to customers, not 'cart abandoners', reading about successful start-ups, not the myriad of failures; focusing on projects which succeed, not the countless ones which fail.
Survival bias is one of my favourites when considering user behaviour, but there's plenty more to catch you out from confirmation bias to attribution bias.


