Dealing with the Primacy Effect in Fantasy Football...Part 2

Last week I explained why the excitement, the emotion, and all the attention focused on Week 1 of the NFL makes us prone to the Primacy Effect. To recap, we love football and we love our freshly drafted, perfect fantasy teams. We've made our projections and our predictions for the upcoming season and the inaugural week. In addition to a great slate of games, we are secretly craving the intense rewarding feeling of pride when our calls are right. The excitement is conveyed to our brain via the release of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine which serves to heighten the sensitivity of our neurons, particularly those that are involved in attention, strategy, decision making, and memory formation. Neurons from the emotion processing regions of the brain and those that signal reward are also connected to this key area, the pre-frontal cortex. The perfect storm of watching the games attentively, caring deeply about what happens in each, and being so excited about football after waiting so long has our brains humming along in a beautifully synchronous overdrive mode, allowing memories to form easily. You will have no trouble remembering the Week 1 performances. That is the essence of the Primacy Effect: the first instance of a series is recalled more accurately and more easily than subsequent events.

I write about Cognitive Biases in Fantasy Sports so that you can avoid being misled by your brain, so that you can be aware of the little traps it sets for you, and make the best decisions for your teams. The Primacy Effect is a fact of life, you can't change it, and there's really no reason you should want to. It's finally the first week of football, you're getting stats and information that matters, you're competing on the fantasy field at last! The only danger is that your memory of this weeks' performances will carry undue weight when you go to make decisions down the road. Whom to sit, trade, pick up, or drop? Those decisions, already upon some of us, are the ones that will make or break your season and you don't want to rely too much on Week 1 impressions.
Don't ignore the plethora of good solid analysis and advice this week; it's what you have to go on right now, but just realize that there is as much reason to believe Week 1 is a fluke as to believe it will be indicative of the rest of the season. A few performances that will be susceptible to the Primacy Effect this year:

The first time, ever I saw you play...
Rookies getting their big chances were in the spotlight this past weekend. Montee Ball kicked off the disappointment festival on Thursday going 8 for 24 with one (unproductive) goal line carry in the dominant Broncos win. Zach Sudfeld was simply not part of the NE game plan this week. Teammate Kenbrell Thompkins failed to make the most of his opportunities, finishing 4 for 42 and he was involved in a couple botched plays in the end zone. Eddie Lacy showed some flash against the vaunted SF defense, and was a decent flex play. Tavon Austin was better in PPR (6/41) than standard scoring. Rookie QB EJ Manuel was solid, leaving his owners or distant admirers with a pleasant first impression.  DeAndre Hopkins did exactly what was asked of him in a 5/66 effort Monday night. All of these guys are likely to have up and down weeks. It's what young players typically do.

We are never, ever, ever getting back together...
It should take more than one bad game to truly make the dead to me list, but James Jones, Chris Ivory, and Brandon Pettigrew are at least on some do not call lists. Lamar Miller and David Wilson lost people a lot of matches this weekend with their unbelievably brutal Sunday stat lines. Mike Wallace, TY Hilton, Dwayne Bowe, Calvin Johnson, Dez Bryant, and Eric Decker also failed to cash in on their teams' successes in Week 1. You're probably going to have a little knot in your stomach when you start them going forward as the memory of this dud stays with you.

The first cut is the deepest...
And ouch! The cuts many of the stud rushers made in Week 1 were downright painful. Half of the first round RBs disappointed owners. Since you aren't dropping or sitting your RB1 any time soon, the disappointing days by Doug Martin, CJ Spiller, TRich, Lynch, Ridley, and MJD just have to be borne with gritted teeth. There are better weeks ahead.

It feels like the first time...
We've seen it before from most of these guys, but damn, it's so nice. Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Anquan Boldin, Philip Rivers, LeSean McCoy, Julius Thomas, Leonard Hankerson, Adrian Peterson, Reggie Bush, Eddie Royal, Demaryius Thomas, AJ Green, Vernon Davis, Victor Cruz, Jared Cook, and Joique Bell may have just played their best games of the year. Or they could stay on pace for MVP seasons. Either way, the guys with outstanding Week 1 games tend to get our trust and high expectations for the year.

So call me, maybe
The Primacy Effect makes sure that this awesome, long awaited weekend of football sets the tone for the rest of the season. When you face a decision about a player in the coming weeks, you'll reflect first on this performance. Being aware of the Primacy Effect can temper its effects a little bit, and prevent you from weighting your decisions too heavily on this one game. You drafted a perfect team, remember? You had a good reason for drafting who you drafted. Don't let what happens in Week 1 dictate your strategy for the season.

Attention, Emotion, and the Primacy Effect

Just like what happens in Vegas never really stays in Vegas, what happens in Week 1 will find its way into our hearts and minds for the whole 2013 season. Some of the opening weekend stat lines will be truly predictive of season long performance...good or bad. Others will be one hit wonders, and a few will commit fantasy suicide with their debut performances this year. It's really impossible to know after just one week. What is possible is to understand why Week 1 matters so much. There are two factors at work here, attention and emotion. Both affect how knowledge is learned and memories are formed in a dramatic way.

At Full Attention
I don't care how long you've been playing fantasy football; Week 1 is a new beginning, an unknown. When faced with something new, the brain devotes significantly more of itself to the novel stimulus or task. It could be learning to ride a bike or drive a car. It could be meeting your new co-workers or in the olden days, trying to remember someone's phone number. The part of the brain that gets the extra work is called the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). This is a special region of the neocortex that is more highly developed in humans than any other species. It is generally thought of as the "executive" of the brain, enabling such high order cognitive abilities as attention, planning ahead, considering alternate strategies, and ultimately, decision making. Most of the sub-cortical brain shares significant similarity with animals lower on the evolutionary scale, and these areas tend to be associated with instincts, reflexes, habits, and learned responses or behaviors. So the PFC is going to be recruited to help you pay extra attention this weekend. You are literally 'learning' week 1 of the 2013 NFL season. When you first learn to drive a car, you must concentrate on each and every step, repeating the instructions in order over and over aloud or in your head, visualizing, then performing the steps over and over again. Then one day, you find you're just doing it. No rehearsing, no muttering, no thinking, no attention. OK, hopefully just less attention, but if we're being honest, routine driving is pretty mindless. It's become automatic. The PFC has disengaged. Of course, you're not done learning the 2013 season until the 2013 season is over, so the PFC never really disengages fully (this is why we are prone to many of the biases in our decision making), but it is also never quite as engaged as it is the first week. The first week is the most important because everything you learn in Week 1 can be applied to all the other weeks, of which there are the most right now.


The Emotional Attachment
The more you play fantasy sports, the more you write about fantasy, the more you predict, advise on, and project fantasy football, the more you care about what happens during Week 1. This caring goes beyond the average fan's excitement and enthusiasm for football, which we certainly share. We are definitely fired up for real, meaningful action on the field and in our fantasy match-ups, after the long, long off season. Going a little deeper, it is the desire to win, and more generally, to be right, that motivates us to care a little more than the average fan. I've pointed out before that being right triggers dopamine release in the same reward center in the brain as drugs, food, and sex do. I'd say this reward center, the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc), is a damn powerful place in our brain. Rodents will endure severe punishment to receive artificial stimulation of the NAc, and will likewise easily learn all kinds of tasks that are rewarded with NAc stimulation. The desire to activate the NAc motivates human behavior all the time. Thus we watch closely the players we invested in, either in our bold fantasy predictions or in our high draft picks. Correct calls are rewarded with pure joy, a rush of self-congratulations (that's the dopamine in the NAc), and maybe a good beer. Guys that fall short of our hopes or predictions this weekend wound us mentally via almost the exact mechanism by which we feel physical pain. The beer is probably still a decent idea. Week 1 can be an emotional roller coaster.

Welcome to the Primacy Effect
Heightened emotions, good and bad, are linked to the release of a certain neurotransmitter called norepinephrine (NE). This chemical is released to the PFC, to the parts of the brain that are specialized for learning and memory (such as the hippocampus), and pretty much everywhere else too. NE's job is to increase the sensitivity of the neurons it affects. Therefore, it makes it easier for you to pay attention, to learn, and to remember what you've just experienced. With the combination of your emotions running high and your attention as full as it gets, you are all set to experience the Primacy Effect. The Primacy Effect is the phenomenon of the first instance carrying the most weight and therefore being recalled most readily. In football, that means that what happens this weekend will stay with you in your memory throughout the season. The Primacy Effect is pervasive; we have "love at first sight", "you don't get a second chance to make a first impression", and so on. It doesn't mean that these initial perceptions are correct, just that they are lasting. At some point, I'll write about how the brain organizes information and why it's so important for it to categorically assign value as soon as possible. For now, though, just realize that even though you probably won't be able to stop yourself over-emphasizing these Week 1 performances, they may or may not be relevant to the rest of the season. I'm wishing you only good first impressions and many good beers this weekend.

Using Prioritization of Drives Strategy in Your Tougher Fantasy Drafts

Success, ultimate, evolutionary success, basically depends upon one factor: getting enough sex. You may have thought it was all about getting enough football, especially if you're a fan of Zach Law's Ask the Experts series. But no, everything we do, we do in the name of passing on our genes, and making sure those genes are passed on for generations to come. We seek food in order to grow and reach reproductive age. We need shelter and protection from predators and environmental threats. We acquire outward signs and symbols of our quality as mates, be it through our physical features or our sexy material possessions. All in the name of successfully reproducing. Not surprisingly, meeting all of these needs often requires the individual to have competing drives.

Even very simple animals have evolved very clever solutions to the problem of how to meet competing needs. The strategy is called prioritization of drives. It requires the animal to detect both the internal state (fed vs hungry, safe vs fearful, mated vs virgin, etc) and the external state (presence of food, predator, mate, competitor, etc). Essentially, all behavior choices are an option (eat, flee, or mate) and the computation between the internal and external states leads to the "release" of the best option given the totality of the circumstances. In other words, all the behaviors are held in check by an inhibitory central brain, or brain-like center, until the proper combination of information is received to relieve the inhibition of the optimal behavior. Thus the sight of food combined with an empty stomach should be sufficient to release the behavior of acquiring and consuming the food. This type of system is clever, because animals, including humans, just aren't capable of executing more than one behavior at a time. So the strongest drive is satisfied first. You might think the strongest drive would always be to mate, but in many cases initiating a mating behavior sequence would be a poor choice (It seems like birds and bugs have this figured out, but some humans are still learning) For instance, many animals do a flashy courting ritual that by design is loud and showy in order to attract and entice the female. Such a series of behaviors could also attract competitors, or worse, predators. Females are choosy and more options reduce the chances of mating success of any one male. Plus a dead animal sure isn't passing on any genes. The bottom line is you have to match up internal needs with external circumstances before making the optimal decision. Applied to fantasy football, it means you need to know when the best time to draft a certain player is. The internal state is your roster. The external circumstances are your league format and scoring rules, available players, and every other guy's roster. The trouble is that the human brain is a lot more flexible and provides you with a lot more options than say, the brain of a praying mantis (the species where much of the above research was done), who would clearly just choose to play fantasy baseball.

Courtesy of BaseballOutsider: September 2011

The league I care most about, play for the most money, and have played in the longest, is a competitive 12 team, 2QB, PPR league. It technically starts 1QB, 2RB, 2WR, 2 flex (where one is a Q/R/W/T), and all TDs are worth 6 pts. So it's essentially a 2QB league but there's one guy that wants the flexibility of not using a second QB. Go figure. Now, there are a lot of draft strategies out there to choose from on your draft day, right? But this particular league is always nuts and really hard to game plan for. So I'm going to try to apply prioritization of drives theory this year. I'm vowing to be extra sensitive to internal team needs and external factors. In the past I've been flustered when my strategies seemingly fly out the window during this face-to-face draft. Not everyone comes with a strategy, and there's always one or two guys with a magazine list from July. Not everyone appreciates the scoring system of this league (I mean they know it, they just don't translate it to player value), so it's hard to predict which players will be off the board in any given round. Therefore, when nonsensical things have been going on around me I've done nonsensical things too. I once succumbed, stupidly, to a run on mediocre TEs in the 5th round after the elite guys were gone. This is the kind of "option" your brain will provide that you need to inhibit.

Just like you can't make love and dinner at the same time without sacrificing one of the two, you have to know your team needs and take care of them in order. You're not getting a top 5 QB and a top 5 RB here. Given the scoring in my league, my priority is QB. I want two of the top 12 QBs in the first two rounds and a backup in the 8th-9th. In a standard league, I'd lean heavily toward a dual threat QB, to gain the rushing yards and rTD points, but in this particular league I'm leaning more toward safety. I know what the waiver wire looks like in October, so if my #1 or 2 guy goes down early in the year I'm hanging my hat on the likes of my QB3--a Brandon Weeden or Carson Palmer, if I'm lucky, and I'm screwed during bye weeks. Therefore I'm looking more at the Matt Ryan/Tony Romo type as my QB2. I really hope some of my leaguemates are buying into the GREAT RB SHORTAGE of 2013 so that this is a viable strategy. I'd like to go with a quality WR or TE like Witten in the 3rd. Calvin, Jimmy Graham, and Dez will be gone, probably along with AJ Green and Julio. I'm more than ok with the likes of Amendola, Welker, Demaryius, Fitz, or Bowe here. This league is certainly not won at the RB position, but I need two starting RBs in rounds 4-5. There will be more quality available here than in a standard draft so I'm not too worried. At this point, my opponents should be realizing the QB pool is getting ugly fast so I should be able to snap up guys like Daryl Richardson, Eddie Lacy, Gio Bernard, or even the dreaded Ryan Matthews (I might be the only fantasy football addict that hasn't been burned yet). Then I'll fill in with upside WR/RB, grab that 3rd QB and a TE if needed.

In order for the prioritization strategy to work, you have to know where in your league it pays the most to have an advantage over your opponents. Then you prioritize your draft from there on down. In my example, it's obviously QB. At every round, don't just consider the best player available, consider which player will give you the edge over your opponents at the roster spot you'd be filling. You'll stray from ADP but you'll be meeting your teams' needs in the order that they matter the most. Taking advantage of subtle opportunities to optimize your team using prioritization of drives can leave you satisfied, feeling safe, looking hot, and ready to fuck...ahem, fucking dominate the rest of your league. When it comes to fantasy, that's how success is defined.

My First Auction Draft

The day of the draft...
1) At least 25% of teams don't subscribe to the late round quarterback strategy.
2) No one is afraid of Arian Foster's injuries or lack of a preseason.
3) You can buy a kicker in the first round.
4) Mock auctions are kinda boring and not that useful.
5) There are still people that love Darren McFadden.
6) There are a lot of guys I just don't want on my fantasy teams.

Those are a few things I learned by mock drafting auction style over the past couple days. See, I have my first ever real auction draft tonight (Friday Aug 23). I don't play in a ton of leagues, but I am passionate and competitive about the few I have, so obviously I want to draft well tonight. If you find yourself in a similar spot I cannot recommend enough the RotoViz Guide to Value Based Auctions. Thus armed with some strategies to test, I started mock drafting and well, stopped. I shouldn't say they're totally useless, it's good to get a handle on the format of the site you're using. The problem is that some guys only stay in for the first few rounds, blow their budget on 3-4 guys and leave. It doesn't give you an accurate picture of current value or allow you to fully play through a strategy. It's perfectly understandable, because this type of auction takes a LONG time to get through, but still.

I have, however, managed to figure a few things out. My draft tonight is a 12 team PPR league (otherwise standard) that starts QB, 2RB, 3WR, TE, RB/WR/TE, and D/ST, with 7 bench players on a $200 budget. I am all in on LRQB, so I'll be passing on the top 5 (Rodgers, Brees, Peyton, Cam, and Brady) for sure and maybe more. I'd love to land Wilson, but I'd be ok with Ryan, Stafford, or Vick or some kind of Bradford/Smith/Weeden tandem. My budget is $15 or less at QB, regardless of whether I take one or two. I'm willing to spend $100 on RB and I want 6 of them. I'll go pretty high for McCoy or Rice and hold off on the other top 10 guys. I'm interested in Forte, Bush, Sproles in PPR of course, and am finding that you can get a pretty good deal on Lamar Miller or Daryl Richardson. I like Danny Woodhead for a super cheap RB5. For my WR I'd obviously love to land the PPR studs: Amendola and Welker lead the list. I figure to spend about $70 on 6 WR. At TE, another position riddled with question marks, inconsistency, and more so this year, newness in the form of rookies or new situations--I'm also willing to be patient. While in PPR it'd be great to get Graham or even Witten, I'm not going to spend the money. Guys like Myers, Bennett, Sudfeld, and Cameron are on my radar and I'll probably take two TE for $12 or less if I can swing it. This league has no kicker, leaving me with up to $3 for a D/ST.

The reason I wanted to get this whole strategy down before the draft is that we, as humans, are famous for a bias that might be called outcome bias, or framing bias, in some cases. What it means if we employ outcome bias is that we judge things by the way they turn out, rather than by how we intended, or expected them to turn out. I could write this after somehow drafting Philip Rivers and Joe Flacco and tell you that I meant to do it and explain how it would be good for my fantasy season. We do this kind of re-interpretation of our actions all the time to protect our self-identity. It's advantageous for us to think highly of ourselves, so we find a way to re-work events in such a way that we feel good about them. Framing is just a variation where I present the facts in a partial or biased way so that you end up believing what I'm trying to tell you. Either of these biases might make me look better amongst my friends and followers, but neither really serves me or them. See, another reason we employ cognitive biases, unconsciously of course, is that our brains our designed for congruity. We want to see and believe the same things. Incongruity distresses us. Drafting a player we hate simply because he's next in line on some site's ADP or our own projections can cause that kind of distress. So can missing out on good value due to our own preconceived notions of what value is this year. What it comes down to is simple. I want you to like and respect what I say here, so one the one hand, if I write everything after I draft, I can make myself seem smart and savvy. But if I write down my pre-draft thoughts and compare to my actual draft, you might learn something that can help you with your own drafts this week.

6 hours later...
Well, surprise! I chose the latter, and my draft is done now. Here's how it went down. In an auction, you end up waiting a lot. I finally jumped in for keeps at QB. Russell Wilson fell to me at $15 as the 19th player nominated. I know above I said that was my total QB budget, but I love Wilson, so I was happy to blow it early. In a 4 pt per passing TD league, I like to get one of the dual threat QBs. I then passed on another slew of RB1's, until Ray Rice came up. I was bidding heavy until about $50, when I dropped out and he ended up going for $53. Then I knew I wanted McCoy at basically all costs. In my mind they are the most consistent PPR RB1's out there. I ended up getting McCoy for $49. Now, I have mixed feelings about this as I have owned McCoy a LOT in his career, including last year. But I'm an eternal optimist, so let's go Chip Kelly running game! Speaking of, on the heels of that pick up, I was able to snag Michael Vick for $9. Now, I didn't intend to draft a QB2, since I had spent the whole budget on Wilson, but Vick at $9 was too much upside to resist for me. Now I've got McCoy, R. Wilson, and Vick, and $127 left to spend.

A number of other RB1s and WR1s went off the board in the next few minutes. Calvin and Dez went for over $50, and Marshall, Green, and Julio went $41-42-43 respectively. TRich and Forte were both mid-$40s. Foster, in contrast to what I had seen earlier, was the 10th RB taken at $37. I jumped in and perhaps overpaid for Reggie Bush at $40. But he fit my budget, was on my target list, and I have a hard time finding anyone else with that kind of PPR strength at RB. I'm happy with the expenditure. I thought there might be a little more value for Sproles, but he was off the board at $34, way too rich for my budget at this point. There were a lot of guys I bid on in the ensuing rounds, but most went quickly out of range for me: Amendola ($28), Lamar Miller ($20), Gronk ($17) and many others. Having passed on the top WRs I was able to stack a few mid-range guys with upside pretty quickly. I got Welker ($13), James Jones ($12), Bowe ($16), and Givens ($11) with little competition while many teams seemed intent on drafting QBs. All in all, I was able to target some of the guys I wanted at each position and stuck to my budget pretty closely: QB $24, RB $108, WR $62, TE $4, and D/ST $2.

My biggest questions going in were about the value of QB, rookie RB/WR, and injured/suspended players. There were some great values at QB: Cam $20, Peyton $17, Brady $16, Luck $15, RGIII $14, to name a few. Although my own rankings have Wilson at QB6, I think I'd rather have paid $1 more for Brady. I hope the rushing yards and TD's pay off. The rookies flew off the board. Kembrell Thompkins and Giovanni Bernard went for $15 and $14 respectively, around the same time. Cordarelle Patterson went for $8 (too many people read this Auction Value piece), Tavon Austin and DeAndre Hopkins were $11 each, Eddie Lacy went up to $20. Josh Gordon and Justin Blackmon were slightly discounted, with Gordon at $17 and Blackmon at $9. Someone took a $5 flier on LeVeon Bell's foot, and Jordy Nelson seemed a bargain at $18. The Foster-Tate combo went for a combined $42, which should turn in great value either way. You can see the full results of the draft here.

Ultimately, I loved the auction format. I write a lot about Cognitive Bias and how your brain can negatively impact your decision making in fantasy sports, but going into an auction draft with a solid plan allows you to avoid a lot of those biases. Although it's a lot more interactions with leaguemates, I found my decisions were not pressured by what other people were doing as much as they are in a snake draft. And with a list of guys in front of me to target, I didn't worry about any position shortages. Everyone loves their team on draft day, and with an auction you really can build your dream team. I'll definitely be doing more of them.

The Pseudocertainty Effect and Why I Changed a Tire

It was 1:00pm on a perfect, sunny, 78 degree Saturday afternoon. We were halfway to my friend's cottage on Chautauqua Lake, humming along the NYS thruway with another friend following behind. All of a sudden we see smoke followed by the left rear tire of our friend's car rolling off the road. We pull over to check out the damage--not good. Friend 1 asks Friend 2 if he has AAA. He does. Now, I'm kind of a fanatic about sunshine and water, and spending time in both, so I'm starting to panic a little bit. If we wait for AAA to come change the tire, we might make it to the lake in time for this (actual sunset Saturday):

but I'm a pretty big fan of this too (actual beer drank at the lakeside restaurant):

So what to do? I've never changed a tire before. They apparently hadn't either. So waiting for AAA was the safe, reasonable choice. But waiting for AAA was going to SUCK. We'd miss the best part of the day. Keeping these thoughts to myself, I announced that I would just change the tire. They didn't know I had never done it, and it honestly didn't seem too hard. Turns out, it was really easy. We got it done in about 10 minutes and were back on the road. It was a great day at the lake! 

Draft day is the first time you'll be faced with risk-reward vs safe choices in your fantasy leagues this year. The first of many. You probably know how you and at least some of your league mates approach these kinds of choices because risk taking is a major personality trait. Men are greater risk takers than women in general, and risk taking decreases with age. We now understand some of the neurochemical and genetic causes of high risk taking behavior and why it differs among people. For instance, high levels of testosterone in young men helps explain why they typically take more chances than women or older men. There are also inherited variations in a gene that encodes a certain type of dopamine receptor (D4R) that account for about 10% of the risk taking personality. Another gene that encodes a protein that degrades dopamine (monamine oxidase B, or MAO-B) is also a factor, and is found at lower levels in men and risk takers of either gender. You may recall from previous posts that dopamine is the main neurotransmitter that signals reward and pleasure in our brain. Some psychologists argue that risk taking behavior stems from the brain's inability to generate enough pleasure sensations from ordinary behavior. An extra thrill is required in such individuals for the dopamine reward system to be activated and give us pleasure. So having a variant of a gene that affects dopamine levels or the ability to respond to dopamine signals can make one innately more of a risk taker. Other studies show that about 40% of risk taking can be accounted for by interactions with peers (but not immediate family). Therefore, by the time you started playing fantasy sports, your risk taking personality had pretty much been formed by genetic and social interactions.

A lot of excellent fantasy analysis centers around who is safe and who is a risky pick. Injury risk, job security risk, risk of being a good real football player but a lousy player for fantasy, etc. This analysis is crucial to making sense of your draft board when it is supported by solid facts and reasoning. However, the advice of the analyst is probably biased by their own risk taking personality. Ultimately, you have to be comfortable with your team. If you like to play it safe and every fantasy advice/analysis column you read is written by a risk-reward player, following their advice might cause you more than a little anxiety. The reverse is also true, you might read someone who tries to warn you about Arian Foster's calf turned back turned leg off-season/pre-season injury saga while you still think he's worth the risk. He was worth it in 2011, when he faced a similarly rough pre-season, after all. A high risk taker is going to be comfortable drafting Arian Foster #3 overall this weekend. A risk-averse guy is going to recommend taking Rice, McCoy, maybe even Lynch, Morris, and Forte ahead of him this year. Your personality will dictate your draft to a great extent, but there is another element to the draft and to the season that interacts with your guts, and that is context. 

The Pseudocertainty Effect is the phenomenon whereby you make safe, risk-aversive moves and decisions when things are going smoothly (outcomes more certain), but risky choices when things are going poorly (outcomes uncertain). In other words, you either "don't rock the boat" or "go for broke" depending on what's going on for you. When you feel really good about your draft, you're more likely to play it safe. For example, if you start off with generally healthy, solid guys like Martin, CJ?K, Brees, Brady, Marshall, Witten, VJax, Colston, etc. you can keep taking proven commodities on into the late rounds. Maybe it's not the flashiest team, but certainly productive. On the other hand, you might find yourself in a position where you take on a few high risk players early on. Maybe you're compelled by the flow of the draft to take Foster, Amendola, and RG3. The Pseudocertainty Effect will tell you to keep going with the risk reward plays. Go ahead, take a chance on unproven but potential goldmines like Cordarelle Patterson, Jordan Cameron, and Gio Bernard. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? 

However, there is one more angle to consider. The brain, well the whole body, really, is also set up to achieve homeostasis and balance. Physiological, chemical, hormonal, and ion balances are critical for survival and function, but we strive for behavioral homeostasis too. We pick fights, we apologize. We party hard, we stay in for a week. We pull an all-nighter studying, we sleep for the next two days. We chow down at In-N-Out, then eat salad for a week. We find balance. This homeostatic force might try to sway you to go super safe with your mid-late round picks if you are in situation #2 above. It might cause you to think hard about the Fred Jacksons, DeAngelo Williams', and Anquan Boldins. You know what those guys are. But, come on, you know what those guys are. If your early round risk reward guys flop, this batch is not going to make up the slack. Therefore, in this situation, the balanced approach can shoot you right in the tight end. But at the same time, I'll grant you that if you can go super safe but stud nonetheless in the early rounds, you may want to take a few late fliers. I certainly like to add a chance element of promise and excitement to my teams, and this is a way to achieve balance too.

The Pseudocertainty Effect is officially considered a cognitive bias, meaning it's something that we are predisposed to do without necessarily being conscious of it. But the extent to which any individual person embraces it certainly interacts with their risk taking, thrill seeking personality, or lack of it. If you're willing to take a chance in the face of adversity, you give yourself a better chance to win. If you take needless chances when things are going well, you risk losing what you've gained. It's no surprise that one of the most studied arenas in which cognitive biases affect human behavior is the stock market. When the stock you just bought tons of shares of drops in value, but you had good reason and research to support buying it, the right decision is to buy more. If you bought RG3, buy Vick too. You know what Joe Flacco's gonna do. Joe Flacco's season is going to feel a lot like sitting on the side of the highway waiting for AAA. Take a chance and you could be sipping beers lakeside in the sunshine. In December, when you win your league. 

Salmon fishing and how your brain gets biased

Last night I had a friend over for dinner. I made salmon (caught by me!) with a mango jalopeno salsa. It turned out a little spicier than I thought, for her taste anyway, which reminded me of an important lesson. What do you do when you eat something that sets your mouth on fire?

Everyone has their favorite remedy if they accidentally eat the hot pepper in the Chinese food. The scientific solution is to eat sugar. Sugar from the packet works fine, anything sweetened with actual glucose or even lactose works though (milk, ice cream, cheese). The reason is that on your tongue you have taste receptors that can detect 5 "flavors"-sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and umami (MSG, basically). Spiciness is not one of the cardinal flavors sensed by the taste buds, but is detected by the tongue. We can counteract spiciness with sweetness because the two tastes share a common co-receptor. By forcing the co-receptor to be used to taste something sweet, the painful, hot sensations can be diverted into pleasant, delicious sensations in the part of the brain that processes taste (the gustatory cortex). This is one of my favorite examples of why understanding how the brain works can improve your life. But I know you're all interested in how understanding your brain can improve your fantasy team, so let's get to it.

Should you draft Russell Wilson or Tom Brady? Should you drop a consistently low production Fred Jackson or a roller coaster Chris Givens to pick up the hot waiver wire option? Start Mark Ingram or Chris Ivory as your bye week fill in? Accept that unconventional trade offer? From draft day to championship victory your fantasy season comes down to decision after decision. Some you'll agonize over, some you'll barely think twice about. Some are routine, other quandaries arise only after adversity strikes your squad. Ultimately it's just the series of choices you make that determine whether you finish at the top or not and unfortunately, many of the decisions we make are inherently biased.

What is bias? It can be defined as a prejudice for or against something or someone, an inclination or leaning toward something, and a tendency or predilection toward or against something. We are presented with biased arguments and pitches all the time. It's usually willful--a salesperson who tells you only the positive features of the product and raves about the positive reviews it receives but neglects to point out customer complaints and clumsy design issues wants you to buy the thing. Presenting all the facts in an unbiased manner would compromise her sale. In the case of cognitive bias, your brain is doing a version of the slick sales pitch...but most of the time you're not even aware of it. You can read a lot more about cognitive biases in my book on the subject, and I'll cover them one by one throughout the season, as the opportunities for biased decision making present themselves. For today, I'll discuss how the brain is set up for cognitive biases to take root, grow, and sometimes cloud your seemingly logical judgment.

Your brain is composed of trillions of neurons that talk to each other via electrical and chemical signals at synapses. The pattern of which neurons are talking to which other neurons at any given millisecond determines what the output of the brain is. A certain pattern may lead to walking, another to smiling, yet another to grasping your coffee cup. Still other patterns, using different populations of neurons, signify emotions, memories, and ideas...essentially, all of your thoughts. The mammalian brain is set up in a very organized manner, so that there are very consistent connections between certain brain regions in everybody. But the brain is also very flexible, or plastic, allowing it to modify those connections based on our experiences. There are two main classes of neural activity patterns that could underlie and perpetuate cognitive biases. The first is a very strong connection, one where minimal activation yields maximal response. The second is a connection that directly activates the brain's reward circuitry.

First case: a very strong connection is established when the same neurons signal to each other over and over. Rehearsal leads to strong connections, repetition leads to strong connections, having the same thought over and over allows it to become ingrained. Once such a connection is established, the thought (or action-think about driving a car or typing) becomes automatic, effortless, almost without conscious awareness and intent. Some scientists think of it in terms of "new brain, old brain". The oldest, most evolutionarily conserved parts of our brains that are shared with birds, snakes, mice, etc. are often considered instinctual, emotional, reflexive, while the newest on the evolutionary scale, the neocortex, is responsible for our attention, memories, planning, strategizing, self-control, logic, and rational decisions. When we encounter something new, our "new" brain is dominant, paying attention, learning and practicing the new thought, idea, or activity. Gradually, as the same patterns of activity occur over and over, neurons comprising the "old" brain become involved, and the thought, feeling, or action becomes habit. We no longer need to think, concentrate, or try to do the task or think the thought. The response stems automatically from the stimulus.

Second case: if a stimulus triggers a neuronal activity pattern that ends up activating the reward circuit in the brain--triggering an area called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to release more dopamine neurotransmitter--that stimulus may gain more traction in the brain than a neutral stimulus. The same is true for ideas, actions, thoughts that for some reason activate negative, pain processing areas of the brain. Rewards and punishments trigger mechanisms that allow the events that induce the pleasure or pain to be recalled and repeated or avoided, this is a major mechanism of learning and training as any parent or pet owner knows well. Once a thought or action triggers the reward centers, it's very hard to let go of it. When something has led to pleasure in the past, we are literally hard wired to expect it to bring pleasure in the future.

Getting back to sports, let's take an example from last night. Let's say you drafted Jordan Cameron as your back-up TE/Flex, in a league you care about. Personally, I don't draft leagues I care about until the last week; it's one of the few areas where I show restraint. If you did, drafting Cameron was in all likelihood a neutral decision. There were a lot of TE's in that range, he's one of them. Last nights 3/42/2 performance was outstanding, exceeding everyone's expectations, even those that were higher than average on him a month ago. You Cameron owners are thrilled-you got a gem late, everyone's biggest draft day wish. That makes you feel good about yourself, for picking him, as you absolutely should. Last week I told you that the pleasure you get from being right comes from the same place (the VTA) as the joys of food, sex, and alcohol. Now you've permanently connected Jordan Cameron and pleasure in your brain. You'll be tempted to start him week 1, particularly if Vernon Davis or Jason Witten (or whoever your TE1 is) are limited or average in their pre-season appearances. He will be linked to success in your mind all season because of last nights performance, although there probably won't be a lot of games where he scores 2 TDs. This is no knock on Cameron either, I hope he's effective and exciting to watch all year, I do. I just use him as an example of how your brain takes a fact-Jordan Cameron scored twice, links it to the pride and pleasure you feel for having selected him in your draft, and establishes the pattern of neural activity that allows you, even forces you, to believe that it is repeatable. In contrast, someone that didn't draft Cameron (yet) is super-impressed with the performance, but it carried no reward, so the brain merely filed it away as another fact of preseason. We're watching to see what happens, but we're open to the possibility of a zero catch outing next week. That's what bias does, it takes the neutral, impartial, rational thinking out of a decision. That is what we're going to try to avoid this year.

Understanding the preseason hype train. It's ok...You can keep your seat.

Lamar Miller fumbled. Joe Flacco threw an interception. Brandon Weeden did not. Chris Johnson and Shonn Greene both ran for long Titans touchdowns. All true statements, but what do any of them mean for you, the fantasy football player? These observations and others were the impetus for millions of tweets over the first couple nights of preseason football attempting to answer that question. Many interesting and entertaining tweets, too. What seemed new to me this year was that for every hyperbolic tweet concerning a preseason play there were two making fun of preseason hyperbole. These were even more interesting and entertaining. It's very hard to figure out which are the important takeaways from the preseason's first games. That's not my job, thank god. I watch, I take notes, I have ideas, but I don't share them. It's the scientist in me. I don't like to speak up until I know all the facts--and week one of the preseason is quite far from all the facts. But preseason hype is fascinating to me, so I wanted to see how neuroscience might be able to explain its existence.

First off, let's take the hype generators, the hype train engineers. I'm talking about the analysts, from armchair to ESPN, who live tweet the games, who seemingly write blog posts faster than I can sip my beer, analyzing the fantasy implications of each game on a play by play basis. A staggering amount of "knowledge" is generated. This is amazing. Having access to the interpretations and opinions of all the best minds in football at once is what makes Twitter the best thing to ever happen to fantasy sports. In order for hype to be generated, people need to take a stand, stake out an opinion and prediction based on what they've seen on the field. Because so many people analyze football for fantasy purposes, there are a ton of opinions and predictions on any given player or system. The whole purpose of putting your opinion out there is so you can show later on that you were right. If you're right, then more people will pay attention to your future opinions, and pretty soon you have a nice following. As I wrote about last time, being right stimulates the reward circuitry in our brain, leading to that pleasurable release of dopamine that makes us feel so good. It's the same pathway that drugs or sex take advantage of to get you to do them more. So you try to find a different take than anyone else, and you try to be first with your opinion. You might even go out on a limb with your prediction. Studies show that making a riskier move that pays off is more rewarding than a less risky move yielding the same result. I mean, if you tell me on August 9, 2013 that Brandon Weeden will be a top 5 fantasy QB this year, and he IS a top 5 QB come December, I'll swoon, I promise. And I won't be alone.

Which brings me to the audience. Not that there isn't a significant overlap, there definitely is. You can ride the hype train and take a turn as conductor. Why are we so receptive to the hype? Some part of us knows that it's only early preseason, a million things can happen, and there are a hundred reasons we might see what we see on any given play. But still, we buy in for the most part. The first thing is, we have waited FOREVER for this preseason. We are not blessed with a 9 month season (ahem, NHL--still not worth it). We are starved for *real* football data and game analysis. We had the combine, we had the draft, but for most of us, those were like the raw veggies of the appetizer course. We're now on to the stuffed mushrooms and bruschetta, aka week 1 of the preseason games. It's better than raw cauliflower, but what is yet to come in weeks 3 and 4...bacon wrapped shrimp, spanakopita, pigs in a blanket...will be a lot more satisfying. The regular season will be the filet and lobster tails if you're not following here. Anyway, it's week 1 and we're hungry, so we eat up all the analysis and opinion we can.

That hunger, the craving we have for NFL football, the anticipation, it all leads to heady excitation, especially on game days. The way the brain signals excitation is through changing its levels of certain neurochemicals. The one to focus on here is norepinephrine (NE), which is closely related to adrenaline. The job of NE in the brain is to set the responsiveness of neurons, individual brain cells, to stimuli. When there is more NE, neurons react more quickly and more strongly to incoming information. Not surprisingly, levels of NE change throughout the day, going essentially to zero while we sleep. One of the indirect effects of caffeine is to increase NE, thereby making you more alert and ready to deal with whatever comes your way. NE can also be increased by internal states. As football approaches, football related memories become activated, you plan games you might attend, dream about your team winning the superbowl, your fantasy team winning the league, and you are feeling happy. The combination of these states-positive emotion, memory, and looking ahead--stimulate various populations of neurons that can lead to the release of more NE. Think of NE as the fuel that the hype train runs on.

So watching or reading about your team's RB running hard, breaking tackles, and generally looking like a stud out there for 3 or 4 plays is more than enough to fill the NE tank. You're primed and ready to roll when the analysis starts flying, the predictions get crazy, and the hope springs eternal. Except for Joe Flacco fans. Sorry guys, not looking good for y'all. OK, there, I did it too. Enjoy the ride.