Surrogation Skepticism

When it comes to making decisions, the imagination has been virtually our only option throughout human history. It’s such a deeply ingrained process that we likely never even think about an alternative. When making decisions, people imagine how they’ll feel once they’ve made the decision. If they imagine that the decision is worth doing, they may pursue it. But we have shown that the imagination does an awful job of simulating what the future will feel like for all kinds of reasons. In one-on-one studies surrogation not only produces far more accurate results than imagination, it also avoids each of the pitfalls that make the imagination such an unreliable method of decision-making. So why aren’t we all using surrogation? Well, there aren’t many people who know about it yet. What’s troubling is that many of the people who have been made aware of the superiority of surrogation have stuck with imagination. Why are these people choosing a lesser option? What’s the deal with surrogation skepticism?

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert pinpoints the reason behind people’s reluctance to adopt a clearly superior decision-making method. People tend to overestimate how unique they are. People believe that they are fundamentally different from other people. As a result, they think that the experiences of strangers don’t necessarily apply to them. So they keep on imagining and keep on making poor decisions.

“Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having better “football sense” than their teammates. Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers, and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers. Ironically, the bias toward seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see ourselves as less biased than average too.”

We may be inclined to rate ourselves as better than average, but it isn’t that simple.

“When people are asked about generosity, they claim to perform a greater number of generous acts than others do; but when they are asked about selfishness, they claim to perform a greater number of selfish acts than others do. When people are asked about their ability to perform an easy task, such as driving a car or riding a bike, they rate themselves as better than others; but when they are asked about their ability to perform a difficult task, such as juggling or playing chess, they rate themselves as worse than others.”

Gilbert cites three reasons for why we think we’re special.

1. The way we know ourselves is completely unique. We experience our personal thoughts and feelings constantly. If you compare the experience of being a self and the experience of interacting with other people, it makes sense that we would overestimate our uniqueness.
2. Feeling unique feels good. While we enjoy relating to people, we don’t like feeling too similar to other people. He provides the example of someone’s night being ruined by seeing another person with the exact same outfit at a party.
3. We overestimate everyone’s uniqueness. In our social lives we select the people we associate with by distinguishing valued traits. “Individual similarities are vast, but we don’t care much about them because they don’t help us do what we are here on earth to do, namely, distinguish Jack from Jill and Jill from Jennifer… Because we spend so much time searching for, attending to, thinking about, and remembering these differences, we tend to overestimate their magnitude and frequency, and thus end up thinking of people as more varied than they actually are.”

The moral of the story is that the handful of people that have rejected surrogation have done so on false grounds. It’s ironic that people seem to be wary of basing decisions on the experience of strangers since we’ve shown how the imagination makes us strangers to ourselves.The experience of strangers might seem like they aren’t applicable to you but the results can’t be ignored.

Gilbert seems to think the results can and have been ignored. He concludes his book with a tone of resignation. One of his last sections is called “Rejecting the Solution”. His final two sentences say, “There is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.” In other words, at least we can become aware that the imagination is preventing us from making good decisions even if we refuse to do anything about it.

Next time we’ll look at how Sentio Search will make people want to make the change and embrace the solution of surrogation.

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.

Mind Games: The Failure of Imagination

We know that our actions play a major part in how happy we are. Before we act, we decide. When we go about making decisions we use our imaginations to construct a mental simulation of the future. If we like what we see, we are likely to go forward with a decision and carry it out as an action. Unfortunately, we aren’t very skilled at making decisions that lead to happy outcomes. Our brains work in ways that allow for consistent mistakes that undermine us. What’s worse, our tricky brains trip us up without us ever realizing a problem exists.

Harvard Professor of Psychology, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness illustrates the many ways in which imagination fails us. He covers three major issues in our thinking process that confound us.

It’s All in the Details

Do you trust your memories? How much? When reminiscing about the good old days with friends and family, how often are the details in sync? What did you have for lunch last Friday? Stumped? But you probably remember your first kiss. But what kind of shoes were you wearing at the time? Our memories aren’t like video cameras that record events in great detail, they work more like cheap camera phones capturing blurry snapshots. Our crafty brains compensate for the vague nature of memories by filling in details which often don’t reflect our past realities accurately. Just as we tend to subconsciously fill in the blanks with invented detail, we also tend to leave out important details that should be considered. The subconscious nature of this process gives us a false confidence in the validity of our sketchy recall. We think our memories are accurate reproductions of our past and depend upon them for decision-making uncritically. The implication here is that we make assumptions about the future based on distorted, incomplete memories which leads to distorted expectations of the future. Any good spy will tell you that you can’t execute a mission on bad intel.

Presentism

Concentrate on this picture.

While you’re still concentrating on the puppy, try to imagine your best friend’s face in detail.  

Hard, right? We use our visual cortex to see but we also use it to construct images mentally. When faced with the task of physically seeing and constructing an image mentally, our physical senses take precedence. This is why it’s easier to visualize a mental image if we close our eyes or remember the melody of a song if we clog our ears to shut out distracting sounds. We imagine the future in the same way that we imagine how a face looks. When thinking about the future we “pre-feel” the imagined situation when assessing its merits. If I play basketball on Saturday, how will it make me feel? The problem with pre-feeling is that just like with our physical senses, the present takes precedence over the imagination. How we feel when we’re thinking about the future affects what we imagine we will feel about the future. This is easy to illustrate. People who have overeaten buy less groceries than they need and regret it later. The present sensation of being full clouds our ability to imagine correctly the extent of our future hunger. If we’re thinking about playing basketball on Saturday after a grueling workout, we are likely to mistakenly pre-feel that it will be a negative experience. Gilbert puts it succinctly, “Future events may request access to the emotional areas of our brains, but current events almost always get the right of way.” “It is only natural that we should imagine the future and then consider how doing so makes us feel, but because our brains are hell-bent on responding to current events, we mistakenly conclude that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today.”

The Psychological Immune System

We’ve spoken before of the hedonic treadmill theory. It tell us that we overestimate the impact that major positive and negative events will have on us. We have a psychological immune system that buffers tragedy and mitigates overestimated pleasure. We’ll feel less bad than we think we will if we become paralyzed and less good than we think we will if we win the lottery. This kind of protection extends to how our brains interpret reality. Experiences are ambiguous and subject to all kinds of interpretation. We tend to interpret the world in ways that are charitable to us. Our achievements are due to our talent, skill and effort while our failings are circumstantial. We learn to like what we have and think less about what we don’t. Because this process happens subconsciously, we think our experience of reality is pure. When making decisions we don’t count on our psychological immune system to work its magic in the future and reinterpret reality in our favor. This prevents us from making tough decisions and encourages inaction. Our imagination is skewed. The mental simulation process doesn’t account for how things feel differently once we actually experience them.

Now what?

Gilbert says that the cumulative effect of the failings of the imagination is that we “become strangers to ourselves.” But what else could we possibly do to make decisions? Surely we can’t abstain from thinking about the future? He suggests an alternate method free from all the faults of mental predictions. Surrogation…

Can we make ourselves happier?

So far we’ve established that the desire for happiness is central in virtually all we do. We’ve also come up with a concrete definition of what we mean by happiness. Quoting from last time, “It’s not that we want to feel good forever and always, it’s that we want to feel good about where we are and where we’re going in life.”

It’s important to define what can be a difficult concept to pin down and to acknowledge the extent to which happiness dominates the way we live. That said, few of us need convincing that we all want to lead happy lives. The first difficult question we must confront is whether or not we can take actions that will lead to better happiness outcomes. Is this even possible?

The concept of the hedonic treadmill accounts for the interplay between genetics and life circumstances in determining happiness. “Hedonic” means “that which relates to pleasure” and for our purposes is interchangeable with “happiness”. The idea is that each person has their own genetic happiness set point. No matter what life brings us, be it a lottery win or a death in the family,  we eventually settle back into our genetically determined level of happiness.

The theory seems to indicate that happiness is largely a result of our genetic make up and that we have little say in making a difference in our happiness. Not so fast. Studies have shown that our level of happiness is determined as shown in the chat below.

What we do counts almost as much as what we were born with. Intentional activity (the actions we take) counts four times as much as the circumstances life throws at you. Each of us has a tremendous say in our own happiness. The video below illustrates this theory clearly.

It shows two twins (who share genetic make up) with comparable life circumstances. One is happier than average, the other less happy than average. The vital difference being the attitudes and actions of each twin. The happy twin is positive and proactive. The  unhappy twin is negative and resigned to her circumstances. If the unhappy twin makes an effort to change her outlook and her actions, she can become happier.

The essential concern we have is that “we want to feel good about where we are and where we’re going in life.” It turns out that we all have the power to become happier through our own actions.

These can’t just be any actions. We have to do the right kinds of things to become happier. This means we need to make the right kind of decisions first. How do we do that?

Just what is happiness anyway?

Last time we covered how happiness is at the center of all we do. This time of year provides us with a particular indication of that truth. I’d wager that each of us has wished and received wishes of happiness for this season of holidays almost constantly, for weeks. Where I’m from, it’s not unusual for the “Happy New Year” greeting to continue on as late as April. Happiness and the desire for it are ingrained even in the way we speak.

But happiness as a concept is difficult to pin down. It can mean different things to different people. It can also mean different things to the same people at different times. We can approach the idea spiritually, scientifically or philosophically. For our purposes, we engage scientifically.

At the most basic level, happiness is a positive emotional state. It is an experience of a good feeling.

Positive psychologists have come up with different theories regarding happiness and the way we live. There’s the hedonism theory, which stresses the accumulation of pleasure; the desire theory, which thinks of the happiest life as one where the most desires are fulfilled and the objective list theory, where happiness requires achievement in “worthwhile pursuits” as essential. A fourth theory, authentic happiness, combines all the previous three so that the pleasant, the good and the meaningful are all accounted for.

But things aren’t universally pleasant, good or considered worthwhile. It’s for this reason that the idea of subjective well-being is thought to be the best way to approach happiness in the field.

Subjective well-being considers the emotional feeling of happiness but it also has an analytical component where individuals assess how satisfied they are with their lives. It includes an overall assessment as well as specific assessments for different aspects of life. How you feel about important parts of your life like your career, your family life and your love life contribute significantly to your happiness.  With subjective well-being, each person has their own idea of happiness and their own feeling about how happy they are.

So when I speak about how happiness is central to our lives, I’m talking about how we all want to attain or maintain a high level of personal life satisfaction. It’s not that we want to feel good forever and always, it’s that we want to feel good about where we are and where we’re going in life.

“Happiness is a direction, not a place.” – Sydney J. Harris

This leaves us with a big question in the face of elusive happiness. Is our level of happiness something we can change? Is happiness something we can work toward?

We’ll answer these questions next time.