I have been part of a family football pool for many years now. Every week, each of us predicts the winners for every NFL game, right through the playoffs, and everyone's performance is posted in a running tally. In recent years, I have been one of the very worst players in this pool, but I have a good excuse.
I am a longtime Washington Redskins fan, and I pick the 'Skins week in and week out. Other family members hail from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Indianapolis, and they also tend to bet on their home teams. The difference is that those teams are all good -- and the 'Skins are not. In fact, they're been awful for many years now. So I'm in effect giving away points every week.
Why do I do this when I know it doesn't make sense? Is it simply wishful thinking? It makes sense that I would favor the 'Skins at the start of each season -- otherwise why be a fan? -- but why do I never seem to learn from experience as one dreary loss turns into another? It seems that by mid-season my optimism should have turned sour, but it never does. I genuinely feel, every week, that this is the week they are going to turn it all around.
Psychological scientists are very interested in this kind of irrational optimism, not so much for football pools, but because it also shapes our decisions in consequential realms like finance, romance and health care. For this reason, Yale University scientist Cade Massey and his colleagues decided to explore the human bias for optimism, especially optimism that endures against all logic. They decided that the perfect venue for studying irrational optimism was . . . a football pool.
They studied a pool not unlike my own family's pool. They invited more than 900 NFL fans to predict the winners of each game for an entire season, although they bet against the official bookmakers' "spread" as well. They offered monetary prizes, both for weekly picks and for the season's best prognosticator. The prizes were important, because they wanted the fans to have an incentive to pick as accurately as they could. The pool of bettors included about the same number of fans for each of the league's 32 teams and, importantly, these were serious fans: They typically watched more than three games a week on TV, and owned not one, but two team jerseys.
The scientists scored each fan's predictions every week for 17 weeks, giving them feedback on their performance for each week before they predicted the next week. The idea was to see if fans showed an optimism bias for their favorite team, and if this bias persisted or diminished over the course of the season. In other words, did they learn anything from their experience that might make them more rational decision makers? And if not, why not?
The results were unambiguous and intriguing. As reported in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers were much more optimistic about their own team winning than they were about any other team winning. What's more, their early optimism about their home team persisted the entire season; fans were as optimistically biased after four months as they were after just four weeks. But here's the interesting part: Their optimism persisted even though they did seem to become more discriminating prognosticators over the four months. That is, given extensive feedback plus incentives, their picks did become more accurate over time -- they learned to make better predictions -- yet they didn't give up their unrealistic hopes for their favorites.
Is this the triumph of hope and desire over experience and reason? It appears so. The scientists ran several statistical tests to determine the source of such irrational optimism, and all evidence points to desire. Simply put, if we want something to happen, we're more sanguine that it will happen.
These studies leave one important question unanswered: Do overly optimistic fans truly believe in their predictions? That's a hard one to answer, even for myself. When I bet on the Redskins against all odds, I truly believe that they are capable of winning "on any given Sunday." But just as important, I want them to win and I know that, come Sunday afternoon, I don't want my emotions divided between my hopes and my wager.
Wray Herbert: The Neurology of Schadenfreude
Ari Shapiro: The 2011 Denver Broncos: Let the Optimism Begin
NFL.com - Official Site of the National Football League
National Football League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NFL on Yahoo! Sports - News, Scores, Standings, Rumors, Fantasy Games
NFL News, Videos, Scores, Teams, Standings, Stats - FOX Sports on MSN
Why are there still millions of fans for teams that, for lack of a better term, have "never won anything"? Is it blind devotion? Irrational optimism? Or is it simply "luck of the draw", in that it's the first external devotion someone might have had as a child, and it never changed because they have lived in that region their whole life?
When it comes to the NFL, I'm a 49er fan. I predicted the Niners to go 9-7 at the beginning of the season, then backed it off to 6-10 at the halfway mark. As much as I want them to go 16-0 every year, I could tell that wasn't likely to happen (far from it).
I feel like I'm more able to pick reasonably because, although I'm a lifelong/devoted fan of a team in each major sport, I'm not emotionally attached. I don't base the value of my life on the outcome of games or seasons, which is what I think is really going on for a lot of people. You can be a loyalist without being an apologist.
Both seem to involve hope, a very powerful and often irrational emotion.
Kim Bauer
www.confabulicious.com
JETS
JETS
JETS
YUCK
YUCK
YUCK
Not exactly. It's the triumph of team loyalty over external events. It isn't even optimism, as the study calls it. It's team loyalty, pure and simple, the single major virtue/skill/knowledge-set that the American public school system inculcates in every student. Neither rationality nor optimism have anything to do with it. The embarassing part is a that gaggle of psychology-scientists ignored the obvious to fabricate a study that proves they ignored the obvious.
When we face a challenge we come up with a creative way around it not just sit there and hope that the challenge will find its own solution.
Take the bail out situation of the financial system.
We know it won't work but because we're told that it will, in the short-term, keep housing values up, or keep open the banks that issued your credit card or mortgage open, we just sit there and hope.
My biggest fear is that it will become too late before everyone figures out that the bail outs will never work and that we need to restore Glass-Steagall as soon as possible.
I can only hope for so long, then I have to prepare myself as much as I can in case that never happens.