Fantasy Football: system 2 preparations / system 1 choices

Fantasy Football

Jack Tarshis is the son of one of my best friends. He is a filmmaker and soon to be a graduate of college.

He loves football . . . American football, mind you, not that “pretender” kind that most of the world plays and watches passionately. But I jest and digress.  

As the NFL prepares to kick off its 2014 season, this past weekend Jack declined an invitation to a barbeque (and free beer!) because he was preparing for his “fantasy football draft” which took place at 6.00pm on Sunday.

It seems that even more than watching football, Jack loves fantasy football, an interactive competition where players compete against each other as general managers of virtual teams built from real players.  

To give a sense of scope to this American pastime, according to my colleague, author Grant McCracken, in his recent book Culturematic 'over 32 million people play some kind of fantasy sports, generating a reported annual impact of between $3 billion and $4 billion across the sports industry'.

Jack, like many others in the game, does a whole lot of research on stats and calculations in preparation for his draft picks, reading up on last year’s wins, team structures, injuries, even weather conditions. When I saw him later that Sunday night, I asked him how the draft went. He looked a bit apprehensive, quite emotional actually, and replied. 'I am not sure. I think I made a bold and risky move, but I feel GOOD about my team!'

I thought about how he made his picks - that he spent hours drowning in data, combing through the details to make the ‘best’ decision - and marveled at the lovely example of behavioural science at work. He had done his homework. Yet, in the end, his decision was emotionally driven; he had made a ‘risky’ move, one that left him with a positive feeling.

Despite exercising enormous amounts of deliberate, considered, calculated analysis, at the end of the evening he was making emotional, intuitive, instinctive System 1 selections, post rationalized by his System 2 preparations.

It’s this intersection of System 2 preparations and System 1 response that so fascinates us at BrainJuicer. We know from empirical evidence in the behavioral sciences that both Systems are important in our day-to-day decision making; System 2 helps us understand our decisions and is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but System 1 makes up the overwhelmingly majority of influencing power in how we make choices. Whether we’re rationalizing our decisions before our (draft) picks or after, one thing is clear – no matter how many reasons to believe there are, the ultimate deciding factor is emotion.

So I am smiling for Jack. He had no idea that environmental, social and personal factors of behavioural science were working together to help him pick his team.  He picked his players the way we all make decisions, about products, services and brands: he went with his heart and his gut.

Go Team Tarshis!  We will check in with you at the end of the season and see how you did . . . and how you feel!


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