Surrogation vs Imagination

In the battle of the decision-making techniques, surrogation has been found to be vastly superior to the imagination in different studies. Today we’ll look at four studies with results that are pretty undeniable. The first three studies are taken from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. The fourth was conducted by Gilbert and other positive psychologists but does not appear in his book.

In these studies there are different test groups of people. The first group experiences something and reports how they felt about it. The second group imagines how they will feel about the experience. The third group uses a randomly selected report from the first group to predict how they will feel about the experience.

In one study, the reporter group was given a gift certificate from an ice cream parlor. They then had to complete a long, boring task of counting and recording shapes on a computer. They gave low ratings to the experience. The imagination group was told what the prize was and asked to imagine how they would feel after completing the task. The surrogation group was not told what the prize was but was given a report from a randomly selected member of the first group that had already completed the task. The results showed that the imagination group was less happy than they predicted. They underestimated the tediousness of the long and boring task and overestimated the appeal of the ice cream. The surrogation group predicted how they would feel very accurately despite not even knowing the nature of the prize.

The video below shows an extreme example of the kind of hijinks people can get up to when imagination meets ice cream.

Another study showed how surrogation was able to avoid the trappings of presentism. As a reminder, presentism is a flaw of the imagination where we project our feelings in the present on to how we think we will feel in the future. The reporter group ate a few potato chips and reported how much they liked them. Both the imagination group and the surrogation group were fed a salty snack platter consisting of pretzels, peanut-butter cheese crackers, tortilla chips, bread sticks, and Melba toast. They ended up feeling full on too much salty food. The imagination group was asked to predict how much they would enjoy potato chips (a salty food) the next day. The surrogation group was asked to predict how much they would enjoy an unspecified food the next day based on a randomly selected report from reporter group. The next day the imagination group and the surrogation group returned and were fed potato chips. The imagination group enjoyed the chips more than they predicted. They were subject to the effects of presentism. Their full stomachs and parched mouths the day before influenced their predictions on their imagined future. The surrogation group was just as full with mouths just as parched but they were able to accurately predict how they would feel in the future using the report from the reporter group. The surrogation group was more accurate than the imagination group without even knowing what food they would be eating in the future. They made an accurate prediction about their future based on the experience of a stranger.

A third study showed how surrogation avoids the problem of imagination’s ignorance of our psychological immune system. The reporter group was told that an experimenter would flip a coin. If the coin landed on heads they would get a gift certificate to a pizza parlor. If it landed on tails they would get nothing. The coin was rigged to land on tails so that no one got the prize. Afterwards, they reported how they felt. Next, both the imagination and surrogation groups were told about the coin flipping and were asked to predict how they would feel if they didn’t get the gift certificate. The imagination group was told the exact monetary value of the gift certificate while the surrogation group was instead shown the report of one randomly selected reporter. The results showed that the imagination group felt better about losing out than they predicted. They didn’t realize that their psychological immune systems would quickly and easily rationalize the loss. The surrogation group accurately predicted that they wouldn’t feel too badly about missing out on the prize. The report of someone with experience was again better than the imagination.

The results of these three studies are depicted in the graph below. The simulators are the imagination group. The predictive power of surrogation really resonates when we can see it in visual form.

The fourth study is interesting because of the nature of what is being tested. It shows that surrogation works even in the highly personal context of dating. Experimenters ran 8 sessions of speed-dating where 8 men engaged with from 2 to 8 women. No one participated more than once. Each man would first fill out a personal profile consisting of his “name, age, height, hometown, and residence, as well as his favorite movie, sport, book, song, food, hangout, and college class.” Each man’s picture was taken to be included on his profile.

For the reporter group, a woman had a speed-date of 5 minutes with a man. She then reported how much she enjoyed the date. For the imagination group, women were given the profile of a man and asked to predict how much they would enjoy a date with him. For the surrogation group, a woman was given a report from the reporter group and asked to predict how much she would enjoy a date with that man. The results showed that women were considerably more accurate in the surrogation group. Even when it comes to something like dating, surrogation leaves our imagination in the dust.

This study had another important finding. The women were asked whether they believed surrogation or imagination would lead to more accurate results. 75% believed imagination would be better. That makes sense considering that surrogation was a new experience they weren’t familiar with. But 84% of these women also thought that imagination would best serve them in the future. This is after being provided with the results. That doesn’t make sense. The study concludes saying, “when we want to know our emotional futures, it is difficult to believe that a neighbor’s experience can provide greater insight than our own best guess.” It’s the view of the researchers that surrogation skepticism exists and is preventing people from making better decisions. We’ll address this next time.

Surrogation: The Secret Sauce

Twelve percent of our daily thoughts are about the future. If we sleep for 8 hours a day, that works out to nearly 2 hours of thoughts about the future per day. We aren’t just daydreaming, we think about the future so that we might get a sense of what we should do. It’s hard to swallow the truth about imagination because it seems like the only decision-making option we have. For all of us the past, present and future are subconsciously skewed. If we shouldn’t decide by thinking about the future, what’s left?

Other people. It’s actually very simple. Virtually every decision you can think of has already been made by someone else. Thinking about moving to Australia and practicing law there? How about climbing Mount Everest? Marrying a person of a different religion? Learning ancient Sanskrit? Adopting a 6-year-old child? Getting a degree in Philosophy? Streaking at a sports event? Trying online dating? Converting to Buddhism? Becoming vegan? Running for political office? Reading all 1.2 million words of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time?

There are 7 billion people on the planet. If there’s something you’re thinking about doing, it’s almost certainly been done before. There’s even a guy who knows what it’s like to jump to the earth from its stratosphere. The human race is a staggering resource of experiences.

Daniel Gilbert and other positive psychologists agree that we “should give up on remembering and imagining entirely and use other people as surrogates for our future selves.” “Surrogates” might be a new term for some people. A surrogate is a substitute for something else. For our purposes, surrogation is when we rely on the experience of other people instead of our own imaginations when making decisions.

So say you’re considering moving to Australia to practice law. This is a life changing decision that you would probably think deeply about. You’d also seek out as much information as possible before  deciding either way. You could research exhaustively for months and still make a poor choice. As we’ve covered, when we imagine our future there will inevitably be much that we don’t consider. Things we don’t even realize we should have considered. There are also things we give too much weight to that end up not mattering much. But if we were able to get feedback from ten different people who had moved to Australia  to practice law, we’d get a solid sense about whether it’s a move worth making.

Surrogation is an impressive method of predicting how you’ll feel in the future. It’s a great way to figure out what to do and to make better decisions. Next time we’ll look at studies that compare surrogation and the imagination directly and see why positive psychologists conclude that surrogation should be the future of forecasting the future.