Concept
Surrogation
Surrogation, a term from a 2009 study by Daniel Gilbert's team, is the remedy for the impact bias: instead of imagining how a future situation will feel, ask someone who is already living it. A stranger's report of the actual experience predicts your future feeling better than your own detailed imagining.
People resist surrogation because they believe their own case is special and their imagination is better informed than a stranger's experience. The 2009 experiment found the opposite: people who read a short report from a stranger who had been through an experience predicted their own feelings better than people given a detailed description of it, yet most participants, asked in advance, said they would rather have the description. The reason is the imagination's mechanics, presentism and omission, which no amount of detail fixes. The practice is simple. Find a person a year into the job, the city, the degree, the marriage you are forecasting, and ask about ordinary days rather than whether it was worth it: what a Wednesday is like, what they did not expect, what they miss. Then compare with what you imagined; the gap is the bias, measured. It is the same move as the Mom Test for founders: ask about the real past, not the imagined future.
A real-life example
Before signing up for an expensive evening MBA, an engineer in Gebze asks two people in their second year what a normal Tuesday looks like. Both describe the same thing: arriving late to class from work, and weekends lost to group projects. He enrols a year later, once his daughter has started school, and plans the weekends around it.
How to use it
- 1Before a big forecast, find someone a year into the same outcome.
- 2Ask about ordinary days and what they did not expect, not whether it was worth it.
- 3Write down the gap between their answer and what you imagined, and plan for it.