My Fantasy Draft Had a Bias Problem, and So Does Yours

During my draft last week, I caught myself reaching for another Seahawks player twice before I stopped myself. I already have two on my roster this year, and a third and fourth wouldn’t have made my team better, they would have just made me feel better. Reason being that Seattle won the Super Bowl back in February and I still haven’t gotten over it.

That’s a real, named thing, and it turns out psychologists have been studying it for decades. They just usually don’t use a fantasy roster to prove it.

Here’s the version most people have done without realizing it: you get stuck on a player’s draft position, and no matter what you learn about him afterward, you end up picking him in that round anyway. That’s anchoring, the first number you see becomes the number you can’t fully escape. Or maybe you watched someone have one enormous week and were suddenly certain you’d found a steal, ignoring the three mediocre weeks before it. That’s recency bias, the newest data point drowning out everything that came before it. There’s a quieter one too, where a player becomes better in your head the moment he’s on your roster, whether or not he’s earned it. That’s the endowment effect.

What I was fighting all draft has a name too: confirmation bias, the habit of favoring whatever supports what you already want to believe, and I wanted to believe my Seahawks were still the team to build around.

So why does any of this matter outside of a fantasy league?

Because none of it is really about football. It’s what brains do under uncertainty, and fantasy football just happens to be a low-stakes place where people will admit to it out loud in a group chat.

We watch for the same shortcuts in actual research, aimed at something other than wide receivers. In a survey, the order answer choices appear in can quietly anchor someone toward whichever one they saw first, which is part of why we randomize that order instead of running it the same way for everyone. Put the same people in a focus group or an IDI instead of behind a screen, and the bias changes shape: the first confident answer can end up sounding like everyone’s answer, simply because it was the loudest one in the room. It’s part of why we build in safeguards like online bulletin board focus groups for certain projects, where people submit their own answer before anyone else’s is visible, so nobody’s just agreeing with whoever spoke up first.

Catching these patterns early doesn’t mean every project has to end in a surprise. Sometimes the finding confirms exactly what a client walked in expecting, and that’s still a good result, as long as the study got there honestly. We’ve been building studies this way for years, and it’s usually the small design choices, the order of a question, who answers first, that end up mattering most. If you want a partner who can build your next project with this kind of thoughtful, intentional approach, we’d love to talk it through.

Sources

• Renee Miller, University of Rochester. Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports: Is Your Brain Sabotaging Your Team? — https://reneemiller01.gumroad.com/
• FSGA / Angus Reid Group, February 2026 national survey. — https://members.thefsga.org/news/Details/new-fsga-research-details-the-current-state-of-prediction-markets-313919