Self-selection bias

What it is

Samples that choose themselves (volunteers, respondents, subscribers) differ systematically from the population, skewing conclusions.

Related

• Cherry picking fallacy
  Self-selected samples contain only the cases that chose to appear, which is cherry picking by the sample itself.
• Survivorship bias bias
  Both distort samples before analysis even starts: survivors and volunteers are not representative.
• Swimmer's body illusion bias
  Both involve people sorting themselves into a group because of traits that then get credited to the group.
• Intention-to-treat error bias
  Completers are a self-selected, favourable subgroup.
• Volunteer's folly bias
  Both are about who ends up doing or reporting something and how that differs from everyone else.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#47: Self-selection bias

References

• Wikipedia: Self-selection bias en.wikipedia.org
• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “What we notice: filtering too much information”