Prior to the advent of do-operators and causal diagrams, statisticians and researchers defined confounders based on surrogate definitions which were often unsatisfactory from a causal point of view. One surrogate definition was declarative, stating that "A confounder is any variable that is correlated with both X and Y." Another definition was procedural, stating that a confounder could be characterized by statistical testing. Either one leads to the existence of "surrogate confounders," which help to reduce, but not eliminate bias when determining relationships between variables.