Silver, Bronze & Regret
This is a good time to reflect a bit on the Olympics
What do you think? Who is likely to experience more regret? Someone who won the silver medal in the Olympics, or someone who won the bronze medal in the Olympics?
In one study Bob Willingham took thousands of photographs of athletes in the seconds after they had won or lost a medal. Next, David Matsumoto then coded the photographs according to the athletes’ expressions.
What did they find? bronze-medal winners looked nearly as happy as the winners of the gold medal, whereas the expressions of the silver medalists more closely resembled the athletes who placed fifth.
Silver medalists at the Olympics seem to perform what we call an upward comparison — they compare themselves against someone better off than them. Bronze medalists seem to perform downward comparison — they tend to compare themselves with people who did worse.
Of course, Olympic athletes are not the only ones who make such comparisons……
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When you come in 2nd, there’s often just a tiny margin between you and the winner, especially in a competition like the Olympics where most of the competitors are at the top of their game. So you think “I could have won, if I’d just done one thing better”. The further down you are in the standings, the less you can focus on small mistakes that you regret. It’s easier to consider that you’re just not as good as the leaders.
When you win the bronze, you feel lucky to have gotten a medal. When you win the silver, you think about what might have been had you been a tad better.
This is nothing new. We’ve known about this phenomenon for years in the context of counterfactual thinking. See Medvec, V. H., Madey, S. F., & Gilovich, T. (1995). When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 603-610.
In cycling at least, a number of events winnow down a larger field, in one or more steps, to a gold/silver match, and a bronze/off-the-podium match. So the silver medalist has just lost, and the bronze medalist has just won.
Furthermore, winners get put up on the podium straight away, so the recency effect is pretty strong. This might influence one’s demeanor.
My sister has the experience exactly like the result described above.
From a site that has made me laugh.
“The Gord likes to remind people that second place is just the first loser.”
I don’t know if this is a common saying or not, but it is the phrase that went through my mind multiple times during the Olympics.
Here’s the link: http://www.actsofgord.com/Annoy/chapter05.php
I watched the entire Olympics with the advance knowledge of this phenomenon, and found the only time the Bronze winners seemed truly unhappy was when they firmly believed they were a shoe-in for the gold. Then the bronze comes as quite a shock. Even so, I predict that over time, their negative feelings will be replaced with “hey, I won a medal!”
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It’s like getting an A- versus a B+ (bronze and silver, respectively)
Charming question