Bracketology: What the data says about why people love the underdog

People love the underdog for a variety of reasons, even when the data shows that the underdog is unlikely to win. why?

The answer to that question is, to some extent, built into the annual spring ritual millions of people engage in: bracketing the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

The NCAA’s “Selection Sunday” will be held on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day this year. This is the day the NCAA finalizes the brackets for this year’s March Madness basketball tournament. The next morning, millions of people download, print, and fill out these boxes. All are anticipating a “Final Four” and some are hoping to win a few bucks.

Brackets are very simple. The 64 men’s college basketball teams are divided into four regions, and each region’s games are structured based on the team’s ranking (1st vs. 16th, 2nd vs. 15th, etc.). Each game is an elimination game. Winners advance to the next round and losers go home. The tournament will culminate this year with the “Final Four” at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

So how do most people fill in the brackets?

The easiest approach is always to choose the higher ranked team, especially if you don’t follow the NCAA closely. In fact, higher ranked teams often win, especially in the first round, where big names like Duke and Gonzaga may face smaller schools that barely made it to the tournament. Some bracketing websites like ESPN always give you the option to select the higher ranked team by default.

However, this is not something many people do. Instead, pick the underdog to win, at least in some matches.

This is partly due to the fact that it’s much more exciting to take a risk and bet on a low-probability upset. In fact, people generally tend to root for the underdog. Do you remember the first time you saw the movie Rocky? Didn’t you expect Apollo Creed to lose to Rocky Balboa? Vulnerable people have the right to appeal by proxy.

Another reason people tend to root for the underdog is that making the same choices all the time can be boring. Decades of research shows that people change their decisions over time because they become bored or tired of repetition, even if it leads to undesirable outcomes. But they also do it for social reasons. That is, to let yourself or others know that you are not the type of person who always does the same thing. In fact, the desire for variety may even cause people to change their decision-making strategies simply “for the sake of change” (e.g., from choosing the cheapest product to choosing a more expensive one).

These are all strong psychological reasons to expect an upset at some point in the March Madness bracket.but when Are people more likely to predict unlikely outcomes, such as picking the underdog to win?

We conducted a scientific study that will be published in the INFORMS journal “Management Science”. They found that people were more likely to make predictions if they made them later than if they made them earlier. Applying this to “March Madness,” our findings show that, for example, if people predict the outcome of a game third, they would rather predict a lower-ranked team (e.g., a 10th seed than a 7th seed). ) suggests that there is a high possibility of choosing . than the first bracket.

This is called the “predictive order effect,” and it’s caused by how people think about probability on a daily basis. They tend to treat separate events as if they are related, even if they are not. If he flips a coin three times and it comes up heads the first two times he flips it, it seems unlikely that it will come up heads three times in a row, so the coin “should” come up tails the third time. You may feel it instinctively. But in reality, each coin flip is statistically independent or unrelated to the last coin flip. The probability of heads (or tails) on the third flip is the same as any other flip: 50%.

The same process can be applied to the “March Madness” bracket. When predicting the winner of the first game, people act logically and are very likely to pick the favorite. However, they do not ignore previous choices when making subsequent predictions. Rather, they consider the results of all the games together and think, “This is a march.” Insanity There’s a reason for that – an upset is bound to happen at some point! ” Having already decided the winner several times, people tend to predict that the underdog will win in later matches decided by chance.

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has exploded in popularity for this very reason. Every year, at least a few underdogs win the match. It’s inherently difficult to predict exactly which team will be on when. Science can reveal when and why people predict upsets to occur, but one thing it hasn’t cracked yet is the code for filling in the perfect bracket (which it will probably never crack). ).

Jackie Silverman He is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware. She studies consumer psychology with a particular focus on consumer motivation and behavior, and the impact of behavioral tracking technologies on the judgments and consequences of repeated behaviors (or “streaks”). Uli Barnea is an assistant professor of marketing at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy). He studies how consumers process information and make decisions.