Social Future Simulation
Rehearse a shared future so people recognize change and adapt faster
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 98%
A social future simulation puts many people inside the same plausible future and asks them to act as if it is already happening. Participants spend days or weeks on a fictional social network, sharing messages, stories, images, feelings, decisions, and adaptations. A common scenario keeps the exercise coherent, while the range of responses exposes needs and behaviors that experts may miss. The mechanism is rehearsal: vivid participation makes a possibility cognitively available, creates pre-recognition when similar signals later appear, and reduces shock, denial, and normalcy bias. The collected responses also provide practical intelligence about where rules may break, which groups may bear disproportionate costs, and what preparations could help before the real disruption arrives.
Origin
Jane McGonigal described simulations run with the Institute for the Future and World Bank, including a 2010 exercise set in 2020 that began with a respiratory pandemic in China.
Core principles
- 01People are experts on their own futures
- 02Rehearsal reduces shock and denial
- 03Shared scenarios produce actionable collective intelligence
- 04Plausible futures begin with signals and expert risk assessments
How to run it
- 1
Select a plausible disruption
Use signals of change, expert risk reports, and underappreciated threats to choose a consequential future. Set it far enough ahead to loosen assumptions without severing links to present evidence.
Pro tip Look for a risk whose likelihood or impact people systematically underestimate.
Watch out Do not confuse an unsupported shock premise with a plausible scenario.
- 2
Create the shared future
Define a date, initiating event, and cascading consequences. Give everyone enough common detail to inhabit the same world while leaving room for participants to discover implications.
Pro tip Model the environment as a future version of a familiar social network.
- 3
Recruit diverse participants
Bring many people into the scenario so their lived experience becomes collective intelligence. Diversity matters because the same disruption creates different constraints and responses.
Watch out A narrow participant pool can hide the people who will bear the largest costs.
- 4
Prompt concrete behavior
Ask what participants feel, need, do, stop doing, and do for others. Force choices around realistic tensions rather than asking only for abstract predictions.
Pro tip Ask what circumstance would make someone break a rule or abandon a plan.
- 5
Extract recurring patterns
Identify repeated needs, social friction, adaptation strategies, and second-order effects. Separate common patterns from isolated stories.
Pro tip Pay special attention to responses that challenge a rational-looking intervention.
- 6
Prepare in the present
Translate the strongest findings into capabilities, policies, communication plans, or personal preparations. Preserve the scenario as a mental rehearsal participants can recognize later.
Watch out The goal is useful action, not proving that the scenario will be exactly right.
In the wild
In 2010, McGonigal ran a World Bank simulation set ten years ahead. More than 20,000 players imagined a respiratory pandemic beginning in China, misinformation, distrust, wildfire, isolation orders, school closures, and supply-chain disruption. Participants anticipated that religious services, weddings, and funerals would be difficult to stop and that women might leave work to care for children.
→ When COVID-19 arrived, participants reported noticing it earlier, accepting reality faster, and feeling less shock than people around them.
In the 2008 Quarantine simulation, participants wore masks in everyday life and reported physical discomfort, social awkwardness, difficulty expressing emotion, and situations where they wanted to remove them.
→ The exercise revealed that a rational public-health intervention would meet strong social and physical resistance.
Common mistakes
Treating participants as rational actors
A simulation loses value if it assumes people will calmly follow optimal rules. Emotional, social, religious, and family pressures are often the most actionable findings.
Scoring success by prediction accuracy
The point is to expand imagination and improve action, not to reproduce the future detail for detail.
Is it for you?
Best for
Organizations, communities, and researchers exploring high-impact changes before they arrive.
Not ideal for
Questions requiring a precise point prediction rather than behavioral rehearsal and preparedness.
From the transcript
“one of the kinds of games that i specialize in creating is something called a social simulation”
“people are experts on their own futures and if you ask them before the crisis happens before the disruption happens you can get really actionable…”
“it didn't take me as long to accept reality”
From the episode
#579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism