Surrogation
Phenomenon in which the measure of an item of interest evolves to replace the item itself. An often-used example if of a manager beginning to believe that a customer satisfaction survey score is actually customer satisfaction.
Origin
The term was coined in 2012 by accounting researchers Jongwoon Choi, Gary Hecht, and William Tayler in their paper "Strategy Selection, Surrogation, and Strategic Performance Measurement Systems," published in the Journal of Accounting Research. The phenomenon had precedents — Goodhart's Law (1975) formulates a related warning: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Choi and colleagues gave the psychological version a precise name and mechanism: the attribute substitution of a complex construct with an accessible but simpler proxy.