Fantasy sports and Psychology associated with it
Fantasy sport has a lot to do with human psychology. It depends on a series of decisions taken
by us. The quality of our choices only determines our ranking and our monetary incentives.
There are various sites that provide us with advice that to a great extent affect our choices.
There are various psychological ways that affect our approach towards fantasy sports.
Firstly, cognitive bias, that systematically deviates us from rationality or norm. Our decisions are
sometimes subjected to cognitive bias, which are illogical mental shortcuts taken in certain
situations. Our emotional welfare, how good a decision makes us feel, sometimes plays a big
role in our choices. For example, some Fantasy managers will captain a player from the final
match of the game week. It is not because they believe this fixture can boost performance, but to
avoid the trauma of an early captain failing. This is a cognitive bias in action.
Secondly, here comes confirmation bias. This is the tendency to search or interpret in a way
that supports our prior's beliefs. Often when we thoroughly look through previous statistics we
ignore those not fitting us. Thus confirmation bias strengthens our conviction in decisions we
were always going to make. Confirmation makes us dismiss any alternate options out of hand,
which may cause problems.
Thirdly, here comes the gambler's fallacy. It is also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy is a belief that
if an event occurs more frequently than normal in the past then it's unlikely to occur in the future.
We can understand this with a simple coin where after getting 4-5 heads there forms a belief
that the next will be tails. This plays a good role in our choices in fantasy team selection. Here
we tend to trust an under-performer and make choices.
Fourthly, here comes the endowment effect. Here people are more likely to retain an object
they own than acquire the same object that they do not own. This makes us place a higher
value on something that we own. It prevents us from trading for something new and leads us to
retain our possessions. It also makes us predict the success of our players and makes us
recommend them to others.
Lastly, there is the Omission bias. It is the tendency of favouring inaction over action. It
prevents us from taking bigger risks and thus bringing down our chance of more points and a
better rank. It is a fear of mistakes that makes one take decisions of limiting the number of
choices.
Taking various choices during team selection has various psychological approaches. It includes
groupthink which is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which
desire for harmony results in irrational decision-making. Group members reach a specific
decision with discussion and minimize further dissenting views. The solution to it is to properly
consider alternate views rather than blindly shooting down to a conclusion. Another common
psychological way is the bandwagon effect. It is a way where we acquire a particular style,
behavior because everyone else is doing it. Choosing a player because many others are
choosing is like a slap in the face of individuality and may stop one to get marvelous wins of
points and improve rank. This is a cognitive bias that has been used positively by the fantasy
community. Another similar psychological approach is recency bias. Recency bias is a
cognitive bias where one favors recent events over historic ones giving greater importance to
newer performance. Recency bias can often lead to "chasing points" as we focus on a player's
latter performance than their overall prospects. These short predictions can even cost us badly
without properly analyzing and making choices. For better team building, we need to tactfully
analyze and shape our skills.
So this teaches us that our way of approaching fantasy sports is much guided by various
psychological concerns. There is also a psychological approach of pseudo certainty effect which
makes us take fewer risks when we are confident and more risks when we are not. This can be
seen in good rankers playing safe than the struggling rankers taking wild moves to catch up.
Thus psychological approach matters in fantasy sports