NO EVIDENCE THAT REASONED ANALYSIS IMPAIRS THE ACCURACY OF (OR CONFIDENCE IN) SPORTS FORECASTS

When making decisions, people can either rely on a gut feeling or engage in reasoned analysis to make a choice. Past research has made competing claims on whether relying on gut feelings or reasoned analysis leads to better decisions. However, these competing claims may be due to the types of decisions being made. Relying on gut feelings has been demonstrated to be superior in judgments about attitudes and leads to greater post-decision satisfaction. However, prior research demonstrating the benefits of gut feelings has used subjective and mostly unverifiable criteria for which to judge the quality of a decision. On the other hand, reasoned analysis has largely been found to be beneficial in other tasks that have an objective, verifiable outcome or criterion for which to judge the quality of a decision. Here, we explore a potential exception to this, sports forecasting. Prior research has demonstrated that relying on gut feelings leads people to make more accurate forecasts about the outcome of sporting events. The first aim of the current research was to replicate this result. However, across the 5 experiments reported here, we see no evidence that relying on a gut feeling increases the accuracy of sports forecasts. The second aim of the current work was to extend prior research to examine how confidently people hold sports forecasts made based on gut feelings and reasoned analysis. We further extend prior work by examining how individual differences affect and interact with the experimental manipulation of how people make decisions. In these additional lines of inquiry, we first saw no evidence supporting the hypothesis that relying on gut feelings increases peoples’ confidence in their choices. Second, we observed that individual differences did not predict the accuracy of peoples’ forecasts or how confident they were about their forecasts. We conclude that relying on a gut feeling or reasoned analysis is unlikely to affect sports forecasting. Therefore, sports forecasts may be a boundary condition for which gut feelings and reasoned analysis arrive at the same decision and the benefits of relying on gut feelings may be restricted to subjective judgments and individual post-decision evaluations.