Learn from People, See the Future

Ah, I’ve missed my target! I was aiming for one post a week on a different cognitive bias, since making something routine is how we humans generally do best.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about surrogation. This is the idea that since we humans generally do a rather poor job of considering our future selves, it’s a good idea to speak with someone who has already done the thing we’re thinking of doing. Another person’s experience beats our own best guess.

In other words, talk to a doctor before applying to medical school. Speak with bloggers before throwing yourself into blogging. If you think you’d be great in some role, it’s best for you to talk to someone who’s five or ten or twenty years older who was once a lot like you. This way, you see the reality of what it’s like.

This idea might be best known from Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a renowned psychologist, professor, and writer of several psychology books.

Surrogation confirms the basic idea that we humans look to each other for counsel and advice. Most of the time, we look to follow trends or at least make sure our actions are in line with the thinking of people whose opinions we value.

At heart, we want it on good authority that the beliefs we have are good ones. We want to be right, but we don’t really want to do the work of thinking for ourselves if we can help it. It’s innately human to avoid doing extra or unnecessary mental work.

If we did take the time and energy to think for ourselves in every possible way, we’d never get off the ground. It’s simply overwhelming. Despite our Western cultural valuing of individualism, being at least a bit of a follower is inevitable. (And then confirmation bias comes into play.)

This seems obvious in most areas of life. It’s readily apparent that we turn to others for discovery or confirmation of beliefs most of the time, whether consciously or not (and whether we want to admit it or not).

Yet when it comes to so many things, we abandon this approach. And we fall short. As I see it, we collectively just can’t handle all the fallout from the fundamental issue of not being able to relate to our own futures. We’re good at sorting through information regarding the present, but anything related to the (near and far-off) future is foreign.

This one cognitive issue touches everything else. Saving money--for retirement, for big purchases, for anything, really. Careers. Jobs. Personal relationships. Health. Food. Exercise.

In all of these and more, we humans do poorly in connecting present to future and then we pay the consequences of shortsightedness over and over.

Somehow we need to be able to fast forward into the future and see life as it’s playing out then. We need examples of good and bad kept in front of us. We need to visualize how things might turn out and where we may go. We need a piece of the future in the present.

There’s a word for that: surrogation. Maybe we just need to do a better job of actually doing it.