Leaving mortality aside, survivorship doesn’t just apply to literal death; it usually (and importantly here) applies to sampling: Let’s assume for argument’s sa

Leaving mortality aside, survivorship doesn’t just apply to literal death; it usually (and importantly here) applies to sampling: Let’s assume for argument’s sake that poverty does indeed have a significant, detrimental effect on brain development. If a researcher now looks at poor people that beat the odds, they might well observe that these people used their (above-average) intelligence to surmount problems in their lives cause by poverty. But it would be invalid to use that observation to extrapolate that all (or most) poor people possess this kind of ingenuity. No: it was only the ones that were very smart to begin with. This faulty generalisation would indeed be an instance of survivorship bias.