Football Fans Are An Overly Optomistic Bunch!

How about those Hawks? How will they do this year? If you are a fan, you’ll probably be overly optimistic. After all, everybody is! The Christian Science Monitor reports that a small British study on optimism bias suggests NFL fans are generally overly optimistic about the prospects of their favorite teams.

They’re also overly pessimistic about the chances of triumph among their favorite team’s rivals.

So let the games begin!

“In an April survey of 1,116 NFL fans in the U.S. who were asked to predict how many of the 16 games this season their most and least favorite teams would win, researchers  found that on average fans predicted 9.59 wins, though the largest possible number of wins can only be eight given the number of games where only one of two teams can win,” the Christian Science Monitor reports.

This applies to other areas of life, as optimism bias is not unique to sports fans. A Rutgers University social sciences study found that most college students believed their chances of experiencing 42 life events like divorce and alcoholism were lower than that of other students, and that their chances of owning a home and living past 80 were higher.

So why the high degree of optimism? Singular focus. People tend to focus on factors that improve their own chances of achieving desirable outcomes and fail to realize that others may have just as many factors in their favor

Seahawks fans should note the study shows the New England Patriots were both the most liked (among 7.7 percent of respondents) and most disliked (17.3 percent) team. And that both fans and rivals predicted the Patriots will do well in 2015, with fans expecting only one more win in the 2015 season than “Patriots-haters”

So what are our chances of getting one more chance to take on the Patriots in the Super Bowl?