On University of Rochester Week: Fantasy football is more than just fun for people with money on the line, but can your brain keep you from winning?
Renee Miller, professor of brain and cognitive sciences and director of the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program, delves into cognitive biases.
Renee Miller directs the undergraduate Neuroscience program at the University of Rochester. She is passionate about several areas of neuroscience and earned a PhD in neurodegenerative disease research. Miller’s research aims to understand the genetic basis for sex differences in behaviors. She investigates how inherent or adaptive differences in the nervous system contribute to sexual dimorphism and potentially, to the sex biases seen in many neurological disorders. She is an avid fantasy analyst and frequently writes about the intersection between her two passions–sports and the brain.
Is Cognitive Bias Sabotaging Your Fantasy Football Team?
A cognitive bias is a mental process that can lead to illogical and irrational decisions. Biased thinking occurs in everyday life and work, and in fantasy sports. I study brain and cognitive sciences — and I play fantasy sports. Through the course of a season, you can see a full range of the ways cognitive bias affects a person’s weekly fantasy matchups.
In fantasy sports, your brain can interpret fantasy results in ways that are suboptimal and illogical. This biased mental processing can take many forms, with some common cognitive bias examples including the endowment effect: overvaluing things we have invested in, such as our favorite players or teams; recency bias: overvaluing things that have happened most recently, such as a recent spectacular performance by an athlete; and confirmation bias: believing information that confirms previously held beliefs while ignoring conflicting data.
Watch out for week one, the prime moment for overreactions. Because of the primacy effect, the results of that first week often carry more weight in a person’s memory than results in subsequent weeks.
Biases do have benefits. Many times, our first impression is the one we can depend on. Often, what we saw most recently will be repeated. That’s true in real life and in fantasy football. We just don’t want to be led unaware into biased decisions when a slower, more systematic and data-oriented approach is available.
There are ways to defend against the negative effects of cognitive bias:
- Anticipating you are going to be wrong some of the time
- Being open to learning and differing viewpoints
- intentionally thinking more logically and remaining aware that biases can twist results in ways that affect decision-making.
Playing the fantasy season with a skeptical brow raised at your brain’s initial emotional reactions should give you a leg up on perfecting a logical process as the season goes on.
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