History Main / SurvivorshipBias

* NominalImportance: Characters which are important to the plot will be given a name and followed around. Those who are nor important to the plot (and killed by the crowd-full) will probably not even be given a nickname or [[EverybodyCallsHimBarkeep a profession for the audience to apply a nickname to]]. Expect this on works where AMillionIsAStatistic.

* ''World Trade Center'' tells the true story of two Transit Authority cops who were buried in the rubble when the towers collapsed on 9/11 but miraculously survived. While the enourmous tragedy around them is not downplayed, the focus is on their survival and the people who ended up rescuing them.

SuperTrope to ProtagonistCenteredMorality. SisterTrope to ShaggyDogStory. SubTrope to AnthropicPrinciple. Characters that understand the implications of this trope invoke SurvivorGuilt. Because the bias is almost inevitable when TheProtagonist trope is used, a DecoyProtagonist would be another way to play with this trope. Compare DeadToBeginWith, where since they "survived" as an undead or something else, this trope is still played straight.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald Abraham Wald]] famously applied this trope during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. A research group tasked with improving planes' armor analyzed the bullet holes after successful missions and suggested adding armor to the places they most often appeared. But Wald pointed out that, since all the planes they were looking at had ''survived'' their mission, their damage would appear most often in places that ''didn't'' need armor, and the correct action would be to add armor to places these planes were ''not'' damaged.

** ''Film/SchindlersList'': The entire premise of the film relies on this. However, it's a case of TropesAreNotBad, since it's a ''rare'' piece of good news coming from that era.

* ''Film/SchindlersList'': The entire premise of the film relies on this. However, it's a case of TropesAreNotBad, since it's a ''rare'' piece of good news coming from that era.
* ''Film/ThePianist'': Deconstructed. Szpilman knows what fate awaits his family and many others, and has massive SurvivorsGuilt.
* Averted in Creator/JerryLewis's notorious unreleased Holocaust film ''Film/TheDayTheClownCried''. At the end, the eponymous clown dies, along with everyone he tried to help.

* ''Film/SonOfSaul'': Averted, as the main protagonist is a Jew who dies in the Holocaust (specifically, an escape from Auschwitz), along with almost everyone he knows. WordOfGod from the director was that he set out to make a Holocaust movie that averted this trope.

An even more troublesome version comes from movies BasedOnATrueStory. For example, if the overall story is about a terrible event like a disaster or plague, or an ongoing problem such as poverty or oppression, focusing only on people who survived or overcame the problem can lead to the audience impression that anyone could have done it if they had just tried a little harder. This bias often interacts with the Just World Fallacy (a LogicalFallacy that assumes good things happen to good people etc.) to create the implication that those who died were somehow morally inferior. This leads to various horror and slasher film tropes in which characters will presage their deaths by certain attitudes or actions, such as [[AssholeVictim having an abrasive personality]] or [[DeathBySex having premarital sex]].

* TheChosenOne: The single person who will fix whatever problem the story focuses on. (Includes subtropes such as TheUnchosenOne, TheChosenZero, etc.)

* This is often an averted trope with episodic series prone to killing off the protagonists, like ''Series/TheOuterLimits'' or ''Series/TalesFromTheCrypt''.

[[Real Life]]

* AmericanDream: Finding your own noble destiny in America, despite the millions of people whose lives don't improve at all.

* Averted in the 1932 film ''The Sign of the Cross'', directed by CecilBDeMille. All the Christians die, as well as the male lead. All the named antagonists live and prosper (due to being actual historical people who died later).

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->"The survivor bias was evident in the reception of Walter Isaacson's 2011 best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, as readers scrambled to understand what made the mercurial genius so successful. Want to be the next Steve Jobs and create the next Apple Computer? Drop out of college and start a business with your buddies in the garage of your parents' home. How many people have followed the Jobs model and failed? Who knows? No one writes books about them and their unsuccessful companies."

* HardWorkHardlyWorks: The character's survival is expected because they have a Gift on a certain skill that makes them important to the plot. If someone who has the same skill set because they worked all of their lives to gain it also appears, expect him to be either a RedShirt or (at best) TheObiWan who will recognize the character's Gift before being bumped off. Works that avert this trope will instead place much importance on ''experience'', not "hard work" in general.

!!! Examples

* Averted in the 1932 film ''The Sign of the Cross'', directed by CecilBDeMille. All the Christians die, as well as the male lead. All the named antagonists live and prosper (due to being actual historical people who died later.)

* ''Film/ThePianist'': Deconstructe. Szpilman knows what fate awaits his family and many others, and has massive SurvivorsGuilt.

* With very few aversions, ''Series/{{Rescue911}}'' focused on emergencies that ended up with the person in danger surviving and continuing to live a normal life (although not always in one piece), as well as victims of massive disasters that also survived the destruction.

* Used in virtually all Holocaust films, including ''Film/SchindlersList'' and ''Film/ThePianist''. Averted, interestingly enough, in Creator/JerryLewis's notorious unreleased Holocaust film ''Film/TheDayTheClownCried''.

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