During Tuesday’s class, Dr. Sample played a video clip advertising the new Walking Dead video game, which was relevant because of how the game kept track of individual decisions and compiled statistics aggregating all of its users’ choices. Forced to make heat-of-the-moment decisions—“Do I save Ben, or let him fall to his death?”—users were likely to choose options they would later second-guess. The aggregated stats gave context for those split-second decisions, either comforting those in the majority (“I felt bad for letting him die, but at least 79% of users did the same thing”) or compounding regret for the few (“Wow, that really was stupid to try and save him”). Generally, people find comfort in choosing with the majority, although there are certainly rogues out there who would intentionally take the less-beaten path.
What interests me is the difference between how people choose when given the stats as opposed to when it’s simply a blind choice—particularly in the context of a NCAA tournament bracket. Every March, thousands of people join online bracket-picking tournaments, often relying on picking the favorites in each first-round matchup (especially for games involving schools no one’s ever heard of). I imagine that, rather than blindly guessing, most people would lean toward the team that has, say, 71% of users picking them, rather than the underdog with 29% on their side. What intrigues me about this is the possibility of a snowball effect, where people disproportionately favor the team with 52% support, which pushes the number higher to 53%, which makes users even more likely to pick them, and so on. And then there are the aforementioned rogues, who intentionally pick an underdog they know nothing about simply because of the thrill of contradicting the mainstream opinion. Once the data on users’ choices is available to the users themselves, decisions can quickly change—in video games, bracket pools, and surely other fields as well.
Image credit: Kawakami, Mark. “Using YUI 3 to Build the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em Game.” 19 Mar. 2010. Web. Accessed 18 Feb. 2015. <http://yuiblog.com/blog/2010/03/19/tourney-pickem/>
Good question about the snowball effect. I don’t know the precise mathematics behind it, but I do know that statisticians can take possible snowball effects into account and normalize the results. That said, your larger point remains: there’s a fundamental difference between making a choice with imperfect (incomplete or inaccurate) information in front of you and making a choice with perfect information at your disposal. It’s like the difference between Texas Hold ‘Em and chess!