By: Kennon Paulk
Choices are made by humans every single day. What outfit to wear each day, what movie to watch as you relax from the job you chose to have and of course the choice to continue to read this article.
However, one of the best examples of getting a closer look into how choices are made by our brains would be the bracket challenge of March Madness. The bracket challenge is where anyone can submit their predictions on how the basketball tournament will unfold.
Michael Hill, a student at Auburn university, has been trying his hand at the perfect bracket since 2019. Hill has been a fan of college basketball for some time now starting his fandom in the year prior to his first bracket.
“Seeing Loyola Chicago go on their deep run and then that was also Auburn’s first time back in the tournament for a while, so seeing them get a win was exciting and got me into it,” Hill said.
The odds of creating a perfect bracket is a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance when picked at random and with informed picks the chance still stands at a whopping 1 in 128 billion chance to create the perfect bracket.
While those odds may seem a bit out of reach, Hill has some superstitions that make him feel like every year could be his year to go perfect.
“I always take at least one 12 seed, like this year I had High Point winning,” Hill said. “There’s a thing I saw a couple years ago and it’s been working and I’ve used it pretty much ever since but there’s this line that if a team is west of Texas they can’t win the national championship so I never take a team that’s west of Texas.”
Hill’s thinking isn’t out of the ordinary, according to modern psychology. Ty Boyer, who is a Georgia Southern psychology professor, says that this kind of thinking flows with the current understanding of human choice.
“Modern decision theory has kind of developed way beyond expected values and there are many reasons and many phenomena that have been demonstrated to show we don’t just operate on pure, rational, expected value estimation,” Boyer said. “It’s called confirmation bias, it’s where we see something that is expected and is consistent with what we expected and we chalk it up as demonstrating our own brilliance.”
Essentially, every time someone makes a choice in life, they feel that their choice is the “right” choice and as time passes, that choice slowly reveals itself as a good or not so good choice.
Whatever ends up happening, a person will either claim to have known that outcome was going to happen or they will say that the choice was somewhat rigged to begin with if it didn’t go as they had planned.
To avoid being wrong however, we do create these patterns that give us confidence in the choices we make. Boyer explains that this is called apophenia.
“It is literally defined as the detection of patterns that aren’t actually there,” Boyer said. “I suspect that we make use of heuristics and our biases in our decision making strategies, they guide the choices that we make.”
So as much as it feels like every year a nine seed beats an eight seed, when in reality these are just patterns we feel have become statistical truths.
With these biases, we then transfer value into our choices. That then makes the choice even easier for us to make.
This is the understanding of choice that Jonathan Friedel holds, Friedel is also an associate professor at Georgia Southern in the Department of Psychology.
“The best explanation we have for choice is about how people make value and how they see the value in the things that they are faced with and then choose the thing that they think has the most value, at the time they’re making their choice,” Friedel said. “So, it looks great now, however it might not look great a week from now, but when you made your choice this was the best thing you had in front of you.”
It can be easy to see value in things like stats and superstitions that play into those decisions, but even then, there are other value factors that come into play when choosing a bracket.
“I did my undergraduate at the University of Florida, so if you ask me to fill out a bracket blind with me not knowing anything about the teams, I’m going to rate Florida really high with FSU and Alabama being really low because I hate Alabama,” Friedel said.
People are always going to try and assign value to the choice they make no matter what the situation is, we look for the option with the best value in relation to ourselves, according to Friedel.
So as much as creating a perfect bracket and winning a huge sum of money sounds great, really the choices made in a bracket will eventually come down to confirmation bias and where one places value.
Hill may never pick a team that resides west of Texas, but that doesn’t mean it’s a set fact, it just means Hill places no value in those schools west of Texas. I would also imagine Auburn places pretty high for him when they do make the bracket as well.