Why Fantasy Football? Communities and Critical Thinking

Why Fantasy Football? Communities and Critical Thinking

Many of us have an interest in football, and many of use already play Fantasy Football with friends.  Yet, there's also a solid pedagogical reason for us to get as many participants here.  

Firstly, I'm very much hoping to use this to help students and staff engage beyond the classroom.  University works best when we have a connected educational community and a relaxed environment to explore our subject area.  

To this end, I'll be providing updates regularly.  However, I also hope we can use this game to help build our community and have some fun.  

Secondly - and perhaps more importantly for our business school - Fantasy Football *can* help students understand some key elemetns of critical thinking.  Like business, FF is a competitive environment, which has a pronounced impact on the way our decision-making and risk analysis processes work.  Playing the game and competing with friends and colleagues helps us develop many of the skills we use in the business world. 

While these concepts below may be thought of as psychological - they also underpin the study of behavioural economics which seeks to understand how human nature (emotions and irrational thinking) impacts decisions.  For a brief intro, see MIT Prof Dan Ariely discusses in this video.  

Rational Thinking - our ability to use data sets (Opta Statistics, fixture difficulty, form guides) to inform our decisions, strategies and tactics.  

Heuristics - recognising how we use "cognitive shortcuts" known as heuristics to help us make quick decisions - but also anticipating the danger of over-relying on heuristics, especially when we make important decsions.  

Cognitive Bias - understanding how our "prior beliefs" (priors) can lead us to make decisions which ignore data.  They are errors in decision making caused by an over-reliance on heuristics, when deeper and more rational analysis of data is required.  This includes:

• selecting or incorrectly intepreting data in ways which support our convicitions (confirmation bias)
• making decisions on the basis of recent performances (availability bias)
• the "Bandwagon Effect" - where we all transfer in/out a player because everyone else is
• making decisions on past "trauma" - like refusing to get Salah in your team because last time you did he failed to score (negativity bias)
• the zero-sum effect - where we believe there must be winners and losers in every decision (such as refusing to bring a player in to your team because a rival FF manager has that player).  
• or making decisions based on our regret of not making different decisions in the past (hindsight bias).  

Hopefully, we'll be able to use this game to think about our own decision-making processes - yet in a way that doesn't feel like study.