Pretest your study before
you pay for real participants
Doppelganger runs your Qualtrics survey through AI respondents in minutes — so you catch problems and gauge your effect before you spend on participants.
Free to try · No credit card · Results in minutes
Built by a team from
Cheaper than a pilot
A full AI pretest costs less than a coffee. Save your participant budget for the studies that already show signs of life.
Hours, not weeks
No recruiting, no fielding wait. Catch broken skip logic and dead-on-arrival manipulations the same afternoon you build the survey.
Works with your Qualtrics survey
Point it at an existing survey — branches, conditions, and embedded data included. Your original is never touched.
How it works
Paste your Qualtrics survey
Drop in your survey link. We create an AI-compatible copy automatically — your original stays exactly as it is.
Run a free trial first
Send 3 AI respondents through to confirm everything flows correctly. Scale up to a full pretest once it looks right.
Read the results
Responses land in your Qualtrics Data & Analysis tab, plus a CSV here. See whether the manipulation moved anything before you spend a cent on MTurk.
Doppelganger is a pretesting tool, not a substitute for human data. Use it to catch problems and judge whether an idea is worth fielding — then run the real study with confidence.
Does it actually work?
We benchmarked our AI respondents against Twin-2K-500 (Toubia et al., 2025) — a published dataset of 17 classic behavioral-science experiments, including framing effects, the Linda conjunction problem, anchoring, and sunk-cost. We ran every study through an ensemble of AI respondents and counted how many of these well-established human effects it reproduced.
In plain terms: if your effect is real, there's roughly a 90% chance it'll show up in our AI respondents too.
Same 17studies, same scoring. Our ensemble reproduced more of the real human effects than the AI “digital twins” built in the source study itself. It won't catch every effect — but it's a strong signal your manipulation is real before you spend on participants.
What you can pretest today
If your survey is text-based, you can run it through Doppelganger right now. Our AI respondents read and answer written questions — they can't yet see images or watch video.
Works today
- ✓Multiple choice & checkboxes
- ✓Likert scales & matrix / grid questions
- ✓Open-ended text responses
- ✓Demographic & screening questions
- ✓Branching, skip logic & randomized conditions
Not yet
Coming soon- ○Image stimuli (e.g. rating an ad or product photo)
- ○Video stimuli
- ○Audio clips
- ○Interactive tasks — heatmaps, drag-and-drop, sliders
We're building multimodal pretesting — soon your AI respondents will see images and watch video too.
Pricing that fits a research budget
Buy credits up front · 1 credit = 1 AI respondent · A full pretest costs less than a single MTurk pilot.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI replace survey respondents?
Not for confirmatory research, but AI respondents are a strong pretest. In our benchmark against the published Twin-2K-500 dataset, an ensemble of AI respondents reproduced about 91% of 17 classic human decision-making effects. If an effect is real, there's roughly a 90% chance it shows up in AI respondents too — enough to catch broken studies before you pay for a real sample.
How accurate are AI survey respondents?
On an external, published benchmark of 17 classic behavioral experiments, Doppelganger's ensemble reproduced 15.5 of them (about 91%), compared with 9 for the AI 'digital twins' built in the original study. Accuracy varies by task: some biases reproduce fully, a few only partially, and AI can still be 'too rational' on effects like dominance neglect.
How much does it cost to pretest a survey with AI?
Credits start at $7.99 for 200 respondents (about $0.04 each), and a full pretest typically costs less than a single MTurk or Prolific pilot. You buy credits up front and one credit equals one AI respondent.
What kinds of surveys can I test?
Any text-based Qualtrics survey: multiple choice, Likert and matrix questions, open-ended text, demographics and screeners, and branching, skip logic, or randomized conditions. AI respondents can't yet see image, video, or audio stimuli — multimodal support is coming.
Do I still need real participants?
Yes. AI pretesting is a screening tool, not a replacement for human data. Use it to catch broken skip logic, dead-on-arrival manipulations, and confusing wording, then spend your participant budget on the studies that already show signs of life. A null result in simulation is not proof of a null in humans.
How does Doppelganger work with Qualtrics?
You point Doppelganger at your Qualtrics survey and it runs the study through persona-conditioned AI respondents in minutes, returning per-question results so you can see whether your manipulation moved anything before you field it on people.
More on the evidence in our research report and blog.
Start pretesting
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