Predicting Unpredictability – When The Player You Choose Matters Most

For the past four weeks, like many other Americans (mostly men) who are simply not satisfied enough with just watching their favorite teams play, I have been drawn into the world of Fantasy Football. This being my first year playing, there was certainly a learning curve for me (which I continue to attempt to overcome). For those of you who don’t know what Fantasy Football is, it is simply choosing the best (i.e. your favorite) players from all the many players in the NFL, and forming them into a motley team under whatever clever name you’ve come up with. Then, as the weeks progress, if your players do something good on the field, your team gets points; if your players do something bad on the field, you lose points. At the end of each week, the team with the most points is the winner.

Obviously, what makes this pseudo-sport difficult is selecting the players for your team. Everyone is choosing from a limited supply of players, and you want to make sure you have as many high scoring players as possible. The real problem, however, comes from how unpredictable sports players can be. While a player on your team may have seemed amazing before, they could totally fail you and get few points when playing against a different team each week.  Similarly, the player who was ignored because of bad past performance may suddenly step up and leave everyone wishing they had him on their team. Therefore, being able to predict the performance of each player is crucial to a good Fantasy Football team.

 

Risky Domains

“Nice guys finish last.”

Most of us have either spoken or heard this phrase at some point? There seems to be cultural understanding that being the “bad boy” (i.e. being confrontational, acting impulsively, and taking physical risks) somehow earns attraction points, whereas being the “nice guy” doesn’t. Whether or not being a bad boy actually attracts women, research shows these behaviors are in fact associated with men’s mating motivation (i.e. desire for a mating partner). Unfortunately, there are a lot of obvious risks in these behaviors (e.g. starting a fight with the wrong guy).

 

Charlotte and Jonathan

 

Keeping Enemies Close

“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” ~ Sun-Tzu

Using one of the most appropriate opening quotes, Nicole Mead and Jon Maner published an artcile in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology trying to understand if and why group leaders prefer to be closer to their “enemies.” Most research indicates the human tendency is to avoid or attack perceieved threats, yet Sun-Tzu and observation indicates the opposite is true regarding ingroup threats. Why are group dynamics different?

 

Anxious For (Bad?) Advice

Important decisions can be anxiety provoking. Therefore, it is somewhat unsurprising that Francesca Gino, Alison Brooks, and Maurice Schweitzer showed that people who feel anxiety — defined as “a state of distress and/or physiological arousal in reaction to stimuli including novel situations and the potential for undesirable outcomes” — are more likely to take advice from others. But what if the advice is bad?

 

Two Heads Are Cockier Than One

Two heads are better than one. Anyone who has ever played a trivia game knows this. Working in groups allows people to combine the knowledge of each participant to improve decision-making and accuracy. In the literature, “research on quantitative judgement has shown that individuals often improve their decision making by integrating outside input into their judgments.” Therefore, effective collaboration is based on the acceptance of outside advice: but, are people always willing to listen?

 

Adding Challenge to What You Love

Think of an activity you really love doing. It can be playing a game, putting together a puzzle, creating art — anything as long as it is something you want to do and it has a completion point or goal. Now that you have it in mind, do you prefer the activity to be:

• Relatively easy, or
• Relatively difficult