The Dark Art of Bracket Psychology




Are you a complete homer when it comes to making your NCAA tournament picks? The Blindfold Bracket offers all the intel without the bias.

Let's be honest: Your NCAA tournament bracket is probably not going to win. But fear not, because there is a way to lose with dignity. There is honor, for instance, in simply finishing ahead of your office's frothing sports fanatic, and then responding to your "victory" with a self-assured grin that suggests, I've always known more about sports than you. (Actually, that is probably pettiness rather than honor, but close enough.)

Forget winning—this year, you are going to outperform expectations. (Isn't that what yields 7-digit bonuses for CEOs?) You're going to do better than you deserve to do. How? By harnessing the power of psychology.

Let me explain. I should say first, by way of a disclaimer, that I have never filled out a bracket in my life. My days as a college basketball fan ended abruptly at age 9, when my beloved Houston Cougars—helmed by Akeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler—lost on a last-second put-back dunk in the NCAA Final against North Carolina State. A part of me died that day. Specifically, the bracket-filling-out part. That was the day I hung up my Phi Slamma Jamma sweatband—for good.

So I have no basketball savvy to offer. On the other hand, I have co-authored a book called "Decisive" (with my brother Chip) that offers a series of strategies for making better decisions. These strategies are designed to help us dodge the cognitive biases and irrationalities that we are prone to. The book has nothing to do with brackets, per se, but what is a bracket if not a series of decisions? And what more noble application of decision-making strategies could we imagine than enabling quasi-legal gambling on NCAA games?

So here are four tips to boost your odds using the wonders of psychology:

1. Distance yourself from emotion before deciding.

In life, our decisions are often disrupted by short-term emotion. As one example, in 2009, 61,535 tattoos were removed, even though they all seemed like a brilliant idea in the moment. As another example, everything Lindsay Lohan does.

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In filling out your bracket, you'll be strongly tempted to pick the teams you love and to punish Duke. Resist that urge. It's not that emotional reactions are always wrong: In a famous case from 2010, reported in these pages, the 5-year-old Fitzkrieg triplets almost won a March Madness competition on the strength of picking the underdog Butler, which they liked because its first syllable was "butt." So every now and then, emotion delivers. (To be clear, this anatomy-centric strategy is not one that psychologists can endorse, although if Wartburg College ever makes the tournament, it might be worth taking a flyer.)

The point is that emotion-fueled decisions are rarely good ones, as any former day-trader can attest. More troubling still, the emotions involved can be very subtle. The "mere exposure" effect, most associated with the psychologist Robert Zajonc, says that we develop a preference for things merely because they are more familiar. So in choosing between Arizona and Belmont, you are going to lean toward Arizona, regardless of the merits, simply because it's more familiar.

To combat that tug of emotion, do two things with your bracket: First, sleep on it. See how your impulsive choices look the next day. Second, think of a friend who is a smart guy but has no strong basketball allegiances—say his name is Stan—and ask yourself, "Who would Stan pick in this matchup?" That's a way of achieving a quick shift in perspective that can counteract the emotions you feel.

2. Prepare to be wrong.

Your sports-nut colleague Joe proclaims, "I know Indiana is going to win the tournament." No, he doesn't know. (See above re: the soul-diminishing defeat of the Houston Cougars, who had pulverized opponents all season by an average of 18 points.)

Overconfidence is one of the most well-documented biases in psychology. To be overconfident is to have too much faith in our predictions. In one study, when doctors pronounced themselves "completely certain" about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time.

The amount of luck involved in this tournament will absolutely dwarf any amount of prognosticating skill you possess. So do the rational thing: Hedge. Enter a dozen different competitions. And please don't enter the same bracket 12 times—that's like buying Apple stock from 12 different brokers for the sake of diversification.

At the very least, consider an "emotional hedging" strategy. If you are a die-hard Wisconsin fan, consider knocking them out in the second round in at least a few of your brackets. Then you'll be covered either way: If they win, you feel good; if they lose, your bracket benefits.

[image]Mike Right

3. Avoid confirmation bias.

One of the nastiest biases identified by psychologists is called the "confirmation bias": We tend to seek out information that flatters our existing beliefs while avoiding contrary evidence. This is particularly tempting in the world of sports, where the grotesque oversupply of data makes it easy to cherry-pick whatever findings suit one's thesis.

E.g., Ballhog State is a lock for the Final Four because it sank more free throws than its opponents attempted; never logged more than 29 turnovers in any biweekly period; and has never lost to a blue-uniformed team in a 31-day month.

When you couple the abundance of data with the "mere exposure" effect described above, what you get is a situation where you will find it easy to defend irrational choices. Your gut tells you that in a hypothetical game between North Carolina and Saint Louis, Carolina is safer because it's more familiar—then your rational mind quickly assembles statistics to make the point.

The Journal has built a tool that is tailor-made to correct the confirmation bias. It's called the "blindfold brackets" because it disguises the team names, allowing you to assess each matchup on the merits—via the teams' records, statistics, and so on. It's like doing a blind taste test: When the labels are off, do you prefer Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Mad Dog? Michigan State or Valparaiso?




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4. Honor your core priorities.

When we make decisions, we have a tendency to get lost in the "muck" and get distracted from our core priorities. An MIT study found that a group of managers had no trouble identifying the top problems they were facing at work; a follow-up question revealed that none of them had spent a single minute in the previous week trying to solve those problems. (Who has time when there are videos of screaming goats to watch?)

So, when you fill out your bracket, be clear on what you want to achieve. Is winning really your top goal? If so, there's a pretty easy strategy to follow (assuming you're playing with plain-vanilla rules): Just pick the better seed in every single matchup. If IBM's

Watson were compiling a bracket, that's what he would do.

Here's the thing, though: Watson never gets invited out to lunch. And there is no pride in winning that way. Isn't your top priority actually to win the admiration of your peers? Wouldn't you prefer the rush of successfully calling an underdog victory over a bloodless, risk-minimizing triumph?

If so, you may have to make a "bad decision," probabilistically-speaking, to pursue your goals. (If you've ever agreed to go on a blind date, you know what I'm talking about here.)

To capture the glory of picking a few long shots, you have to do your homework. First, don't gamble on a 16 seed. Why? Because a 16 seed has never won. Never, in 108 tries. Picking a 16 seed plays to your Cinderella fantasies, yes, but it also borders on insanity—like betting on Cinderella not only to win the Prince's heart but also to seize the mixed martial-arts championship.

How do you find quality underdogs, then? You may have selected some naturally on your blindfold brackets. (If so, stick with them.) If you didn't, go research the brackets of five basketball wonks—if two or three of them are picking the same underdog, get on the bandwagon. There are no points for originality in this game.

In the end, all that really matters is picking well and with pizazz. And, also, rubbing your expectations-exceeding performance in the face of your co-workers. With dignity and honor.

—Dan Heath is the author, along with his brother Chip, of the book "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work", which will be released March 26. The Heath brothers previously wrote the best sellers Made to Stick and Switch.

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