In psychology, the concept of the illusion of control refers to the phenomenon where people believe their choices strongly affect an outcome, even though chance is doing most of the work.

The illusion of control is on full display during March Madness, where millions of people pick favorites and upsets as they fill out their bracket. So-called experts will offer their picks, and their choices feel smart but, in the end, luck still decides most of what happens. One bad game, one lucky shot, one untimely injury can bust a bracket.

A man throwing a basketball in front of him. — Albert Cohen. Credit: Paul Henderson

Are people who accurately predict game outcomes good at what they do? Albert Cohen, director of Michigan State University’s graduate certificate in sports analytics, says that may be the case, but luck always factors into success in picking a bracket.  

Cohen is director of the Actuarial Science Program, as well as a senior academic specialist in the College of Natural Science’s math department and the statistics and probability department. And while it may seem counterintuitive, statistics and actuarial science are more closely related to sports than you might think. 

We recently sat down with Cohen to talk about the illusion of control and how it applies to March Madness.

What is the illusion of control from an analytics perspective?

We thrive on the illusion of control. We’re disappointed when our teams lose and we have superstitions. I have many of them — certain things I will or will not wear when my teams are playing, for example. But to imagine that you’re going to come up with the perfect sequence of events for 63 games — that’s two to the power of 63 possible outcomes — is madness, just objectively speaking.

March Madness is one of those very low-cost ways of exercising what we think is controlled, but objectively, it’s the least realistic thing we can control.

How does illusion of control apply to tournament brackets compared to other forms of sports prediction?

For March Madness, what’s interesting is that it’s a sort of scale in, scale out problem. Imagine you’re trying to come up with the outcome of one game. First, one round. Then, the whole tournament. It has ordered the magnitude beyond our comprehension to realize how difficult that is to go from a game to the whole tournament. March Madness is a perfect example of believing that we’re going to do something magical, but I think we also internally understand that this is just a lottery ticket. It’s worse than a lottery ticket. If you look at the odds, you probably win a thousand lottery tickets and get struck by lightning holding them up before you get a perfect bracket.

Why do you think brackets that are successful make people feel knowledgeable or smart about the sport, even though the outcomes are so unpredictable?

Let’s say I do a little homework, and I fill out a bracket and I have immediate success. Is it designed to make me feel like I’m smart? Is it kind of a dopamine hit to get me to do something else like an investment or lottery or that kind of thing? You made a couple good calls. The coin flipped heads when you predicted heads. I think sports is designed to be gamified. When it comes to playing any kind of game, any game of chance, I would argue that if it’s designed to attract revenue in players, it is designed to keep you playing. I think there is a little bit of that element in March Madness because its design is a community experience. If it was you by yourself in an office filling out a bracket, it’d be the scribblings of somebody that nobody paid attention to. But the fact that you publicize it, the fact that you could be the one with that golden ticket — that, to me, is what keeps us going.

If brackets are doomed to fail statistically, why do you think people keep coming back to them year after year?

Low cost, high social value. I think the reason they keep coming back to it is that it’s one of the few things that happens every year. But I don’t think you’ll ever see another Cinderella team again, just the way that Name, Image and Likeness and team composition is going forward. You’re just going to see a lot of rotation of players between teams.

When the teams are announced and people are starting to fill out their brackets, from a sports analytics perspective, what are some tips that you would give?

If you’re filling out a single bracket, I would still fill out multiple brackets, sit on them, and then think which one of those — let’s say, five you fill out — is the one that you like the best. Once you settle on that, I think just let it go.

I would also look at matchups. It seems interesting to me, but there are certain games that seem to be kind of traps. I don’t know if it’s because it’s difficult to truly ascertain the ranking. Or when it comes down to the end of it, it’s kind of an unintended coin flip if they’re an eight or a nine seed, let’s say. I would also look at the latter stages of your bracket. I can’t think of any team that didn’t have an overtime win or something where they just narrowly escaped and got to go on. There’s just that luck. You can’t predict them all.

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