My Lucky Pants: The Impact of Cognitive Biases in Sport

Sport — jam-packed as it is with decisions, judgements and predictions, usually made under significant pressure — is the perfect environment for cognitive biases to flourish. If we are to better understand sport, we must better understand why, how and in what circumstances these biases and other thinking oddities operate.In so doing, we will learn why…the decisions of match officials ARE inherently biasedpundits are so bad at making predictionssporting form can appear and disappear in an instantpeople behave differently in crowdsmanagers are sacked at the drop of a hatwe bet too much on underdogs and too little on favouriteswe support ‘bad’ teamswe believe our ‘lucky pants’ are luckyFootball (soccer) and cricket take centre stage here, but the lessons are wide-ranging.Read more