The one number
The Gap is the distance between the percentage you predicted and the percentage of people who actually chose it. If you predicted 34% and the verified figure was 74%, your Gap for that situation is 40 points. That is the whole definition, and it is the only number Democrez produces.
Every Democrez round ends with two percentages. The first is yours: before seeing anything, you stated what share of people you thought chose the same option as you. The second is the verified aggregate: what share actually did. The Gap is the first subtracted from the second, without the sign.
It is deliberately a plain subtraction. There is no weighting, no confidence adjustment, no curve fitted across your history. Anything more elaborate would be a model of you, and Democrez does not build models of people — it reports what a population did and how far your expectation sat from it.
Both numbers describe people, not you. One is your estimate of a population you have never met. The other is what that population actually did.
Three shapes
The same subtraction produces three quite different readings. Below, one situation from three territories, each carried to its collision. The numbers are illustrative — they are here to show the shape of the instrument, not to report real aggregates.
Money
A shopkeeper hands you ₹500 too much in change. You notice at the door.
7points. You expected most people to walk back in, and most people did. A small Gap means your model of other people held up in this particular situation. It does not mean you are generally good at reading people, and Democrez will not tell you that.
Society
Someone collapses on a crowded platform. Several people are already looking.
48points. You expected under a third of people to step forward; over three quarters did. This is the reading the instrument exists to produce — a place where your picture of other people was substantially wrong, in their favour.
Career
A colleague asks you to sign off on work you have not actually checked.
34points, with the pins reversed. You expected far more people to refuse than actually did. The Gap is the same kind of measurement either way — Democrez does not treat over-estimating people as better or worse than under-estimating them.
The point of the whole thing
This is the part people find hardest, because every other product that shows you a number has trained you to want it small. Here the opposite is true, and it follows directly from what is being measured.
You were not asked a question with a correct answer. You were asked to estimate a population you have never met, from a life that is not theirs. A wrong estimate is a fact about the distance between your world and theirs.
If your prediction matched, you have learned that a belief you already held was correct here. Useful, but you leave with the same picture of people you arrived with.
It marks the exact place where your model of people and the record disagree. That is the only thing on this platform you could not have worked out by thinking harder on your own.
Your Gap is shown once and is not accumulated, averaged, ranked or compared. There is no figure that gets better or worse, because there is no figure at all.
After the Gap appears, nothing follows. No explanation of what your answer says about you, no advice on judging people better, no suggestion of what to read next about yourself. That restraint is deliberate: the moment a measurement is followed by a verdict, people start answering to produce the verdict they want, and the measurement stops being one.
Improving how you read people may well be worth doing. It is simply not what this instrument does, and pretending otherwise would cost the thing that makes the number trustworthy. Why we mirror rather than judge.
The silent case
A Gap requires a verified aggregate on the other side of it. When there is not enough real human response to produce one, Democrez shows nothing rather than something.
Until a minimum number of verified people have answered a card, the aggregate stays hidden and no Gap is calculated. How Min-N works
The missing figure is not modelled, interpolated or generated. A Gap against an invented number would be worse than no Gap. Why we never fake it
Your response is appended to the record immediately. It contributes to the aggregate that other people will eventually collide with. The Reality Bank
Once the threshold is crossed, the card becomes readable. You are not notified, chased, or reminded to come back for it.
Questions
The Gap is the absolute difference, in percentage points, between the share of people you predicted would choose an option and the share that verifiably did. If you predicted 34% and the real figure was 74%, your Gap is 40 points. It is calculated per situation and reported once.
No, and the question does not really apply. A small Gap means your existing picture of people held up in that one case; a large Gap means it did not. Only the second one tells you something you did not already believe. Democrez does not rank the two.
No. The Gap measures the distance between your expectation and a population's behaviour in one specific situation. It says nothing about your character, your ethics, or your ability generally, and Democrez makes no claim of that kind anywhere.
No. There is no running total, no average, no lifetime figure and no history score. Each Gap belongs to the situation that produced it. Your past rounds remain readable to you as individual rounds, and nothing is computed across them.
No. There is no leaderboard, no ranking and no shared figure. Even inside a private circle reading, the group sees a collective picture of its disagreement rather than each member's Gap laid out for comparison.
Then the Gap is zero for that situation, and the round ends the same way every other round ends. Nothing is awarded, no streak begins, and the next situation is unaffected.
Because it names a distance rather than a performance. The word describes the space between two figures on a scale, which is precisely what is being reported — and unlike words such as accuracy or score, it does not smuggle in a verdict about the person reading it.
One situation a day. Your prediction, locked. Then the distance.
