The NCAA tournament: Intuition vs. Objectivity

It’s mid-March, which of course means the NCAA Basketball tournament and the detailed analysis that drives our bracket predictions.

Uh, wait….detailed analysis?

Do we really analyze the teams and matchups in forecasting the outcome of the tournament? Or do we rely on our instincts and simply guess? Do we even know how much of each is involved in our selections? Most important, which is better – instinct or data-driven analysis?

I found a fun way yesterday for us to test ourselves, at least in the case of this year’s NCAA tournament. Fill out your bracket by your traditional method (presumably relying heavily on instinct?), then go to WSJ.com/sports and complete their “Blindfold Brackets.” The Journal has replaced each tournament team name with a random inanimate object (e.g., “The Quilts”) and provided a number of characteristics that describe the team (e.g., the team’s experience, height, three point shooting, etc.) without giving away its identity. You pick the winner of each matchup based on those characteristics. The process isn’t perfect (are the Journal’s characteristics the best predictors of the outcome of a game? Is their assessment of each team on each characteristic accurate and differentiating?), but it’s intriguing enough for me to test it.

At the conclusion of the tournament I’ll compare my traditional and blind brackets to see where I did best and share my findings in another blog post.

Maybe experiments like this will demonstrate that objectivity really does beat intuition? Maybe then we might start seriously using objective methods in our everyday professional decision making. Maybe we’d look not at the name, but rather the defining characteristics of different companies that we decided to pursue as business development prospects? Maybe then we’d do the same as we evaluated and promoted our employees? Or in deciding among investment options? Or projects to pursue?

Maybe.

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