There are several advantages to eliciting individual preferences and behavioural tendencies using surveys. Surveys are cost-saving in terms of time and require relatively simple subject engagement strategies. However, social scientists who conduct incentivized experiments have repeatedly argued that survey measures of preferences could be nothing more than cheap talk and that, outside the lab, there could be considerable loss of control. Here, we present a set of studies the objective of which was to inform and validate the design of an unincentivized survey approach to estimate experimental treatment effects. We present three sets of results. The first is derived from a between-subject analysis of two independent, but comparable samples of non-student adults. One sample participated in a standard, incentivized laboratory experiment and the other participated in an unincentivized survey experiment. The two methods returned remarkably similar treatment effects. The second set of results relates to a sample of students drawn from a behavioural laboratory’s pool of registered subjects. They participated in both the incentivized lab and unincentivized survey experiments. We perform a between-subject comparison of the two treatment-elicitation methods but, this time, focusing on the same sample of subjects. Again, the treatment effects are very similar. Finally, we establish that within-subjects there is some consistency between decisions made under the two methods.