Do success stories cause false beliefs about success?

Researchers examined how hearing business success stories skews their guesses about how successful other startups will be in the future. Simply showing outlier examples of success substantially affected participants' beliefs about what makes a company successful. The types of success stories which gain traction are fraught with bias. The result? According to the researchers behind "Success stories cause false beliefs about success," such non-representative sampling and explanatory cherry-picking means that "Almost any feature of interest can appear to be associated with success" as long as there exist at least some examples of such an association. Before making their decision, each participant was presented with either a set of successful college graduates, a set of successful college dropouts, or no data, and was required to verify that they understood the underlying bias in the examples shown. Participants who saw examples of graduate founders bet on an unnamed graduate founder 87% of the time, compared to only 32% of participants who were shown examples of dropout founders and 47% of participants shown no data. What's more, 92% of participants provided genuinely motivated justifications for their bets, indicating a tendency to spontaneously generate causal explanations-such as college graduate founders being more motivated, or college dropout founders being more creative-to rationalize their decisions even in the absence of supporting evidence.