Swimmer's body illusion

What it is

Mistaking a trait that selected people into a group for an effect of the group's activity. Swimmers don't have swimmers' bodies because they swim; they swim because of their bodies.

Related

• Survivorship bias bias
  Both confuse who is in the group with what the group does to them.
• Self-selection bias bias
  Both involve people sorting themselves into a group because of traits that then get credited to the group.

Appears in

• The 99 thinking errors in Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly#2: Swimmer's body illusion

References

• Wikipedia: Swimmer's body illusion 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 it means: finding patterns and stories”