Our imagination is also biased by the here and now, using details borrowed from the present to fill in our view of the future. So if we happen to meet a group of fun-loving students on our visit, we’ll be inclined to imagine the college as a fun-loving place, forgetting that there are many other students with different temperaments we are likely to encounter if we enroll. Similarly, a run-in with an unfriendly professor will also color our view.

This tendency to focus on what is in front of us without considering what is less visible is also known as saliency bias. As the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote in his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” “What you see is all there is.”

So whatever students see or experience during a brief campus visit — whether it’s a sunny day or an ill-prepared tour guide — will inevitably stand out and have a disproportionate effect on their decision-making.

Since we ourselves are such poor predictors of what will make us happy, who is better positioned to guide our decisions? Other people. Specifically, other people who have recently had the experience we are contemplating. Dr. Gilbert calls them “experience surrogates.” In the case of choosing a college, that would mean talking to current students or recent graduates.

Experience surrogates are best used as proxies for our future selves. So instead of asking surrogates for information as inputs to our imagination, we instead ask questions about their goals and actual experience, such as “Why did you consider attending this school? Are you happy to be here? Knowing what you know now, would you make the same choice? Would someone like me be happy at this school?” If the surrogates’ goals and values are aligned with ours, and they report a positive experience, this body of research suggests that we should make the same choice and move on. In a sense, the experience surrogate decides for us. This runs counter to our strong impulse to “test-drive” or preview a possible future in the cinema of our imagination.

But if imagination is such a poor tool for making decisions, then why do so many people depend on it? Partly because we believe we are different from most people, and not prone to the same biases and pitfalls. Even after learning about the reliability and effectiveness of using “experience surrogates” instead of imagination, few people do it. The myth of individuality is strong.

So why isn’t there an epidemic of students who find themselves in the wrong place and either transfer or drop out? Maybe there is. The only way to know would be to compare transfer and dropout rates between incoming students who used imagination to inform their decision, and those who relied on experience surrogates instead. Such data is lacking.