Professor, Students Examine How Cognitive Biases Shape Fantasy Football

For many, fantasy football is a game played among friends and colleagues. For Dominican psychology professor Dr. Ben Rosenberg, it's a great way to teach his students about cognitive biases — the subtle biases that shape everyday behavior and decision making.

This semester, it’s game on for students in Rosenberg’s one-unit “Psychology of Fantasy Football” class. Through lectures, readings, discussions, and activities, the course examines people’s motivation to play fantasy football, cognitive biases that affect decision-making (e.g., which players to draft or play), and research-based strategies to help players avoid psychological pitfalls. 

“When we make decisions, no matter how big or small, we often assume they are totally logical – maybe we choose what’s easiest or most pleasurable,” Rosenberg says. “In reality, though, decades of research shows that many of our decisions are driven by unconscious biases in how we perceive or think about people and situations.”

The students are split into leagues that draft and manage players. Through online posts, the students summarize and critique material selected by Rosenberg and connect the content to their experience with fantasy football. The key question being: Have they fallen prey to any cognitive biases in drafting, choosing who to play, or picking new players?

“This assignment should, hopefully, be enjoyable and produce some good laughs and experiences,” Rosenberg says.  

While there are many cognitive biases that impact decision making, a few that are particularly relevant to fantasy football include:

• Availability heuristic: Features that easily come to mind, such as an amazing catch, hold more weight in decision making regardless of actual importance. The catch, for example, might just have been a one-off 
• Confirmation bias: Tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms prior beliefs – so believing that a player was good last year and focusing only on information that says he’s still good (even though he might not be).
• Endowment effect: Overvaluing things we own or have invested in vs. those that are not ours. Sticking with a drafted player who is no longer playing well is one example.
• Ingroup bias: Favoring people with whom we identify or are in our social groups. In fantasy football this is the belief that all the players on a favored team are the best players.
• Negativity bias: Negative events more profoundly affect our feelings and future decisions than positive ones. Even though a player played well in recent games, a fantasy football manager might sit him because the earlier poor performance is top of mind.
• Recency bias: Putting more weight on recent events. A manager might play someone who played well the week before (despite performing poorly in numerous early games).

While many biases can affect fantasy football decision-making, a few are most prominent and best avoided, Rosenberg says.

“Confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, and the endowment effect are extremely common among fantasy football players and can have an outsize impact on their performance.”

Dr. Rosenberg is a social-health psychologist with expertise in motivation, health behavior, research methods, and statistics. He’s also a big sports fan and avid fantasy football player since 1999 - before most of his students were born. He is co-author of “Intangibles of Sports,” a  Psychology Today blog series covering the intersection between psychology, neuroscience, and all things sports and teams. He’s also co-editing a book on the science of team chemistry in sports.