Why Bronze Medalists Tend To Be Happier Than Silver Medalists
The 1992 Barcelona Olympics not only changed this city forever and became the capital of Mediterranean tourism that it is today (for better and worse), but also They left us one of the most curious investigations about psychology applied to sports and the achievement of personal goals.
One of a series of investigations that in the 90s caused psychology to change what was known about motivation and the perception of the value of things. Basically, he showed that, under certain conditions, People who perform better on a task may be much less satisfied and happy than those who obtain less good results
For a long time, in the field of research in psychology and economics, it has been believed that our way of reacting to certain events and experiences corresponds to the degree to which they are objectively positive or negative for us.
Of course, total objectivity does not work, but in this context it was understood that an objectively positive result is one in which we gain security, social recognition and the probability of receiving pleasant stimuli grows and compensates for the efforts, resources and time invested in doing so. for this experience to occur.
In other words, the positive was linked to an economic and rational logic assuming that our priorities follow a scale similar to Maslow’s pyramid and that what motivates us is directly proportional to the amount of value of the resources we obtain.
Thus, a gold medal will always make us tend to react more positively than a silver medal, because its objective value is greater: in fact, Its only usefulness is to be a more valuable object than the rest of the trophies Since all athletes believe that a gold medal is better than a silver or bronze medal, it is logical that the degree of happiness and euphoria they experience when winning the first two is greater than that experienced when winning the bronze. .
This assumption, however, has been questioned several times in recent decades, after several investigations showed to what extent we are irrational when it comes to evaluating our achievements and the results of our decisions, even when these have not yet been made and we are foreseeing what may happen if we opt for one option or another . This is precisely the direction in which the research on the Barcelona Olympics, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, pointed in 1995.
An investigation based on facial expressions
In this research we wanted to compare the reactions of the winners of a silver medal with those of the winners of a bronze to see to what extent their degree of anger or joy corresponded to the objective value of their trophy To carry out the study, we worked on the presupposition that “the face is the mirror of the soul”, that is, that from the interpretation of facial expressions, a group of judges can imagine in a very approximate way the state emotional of the person in question.
It is clear that there is always the possibility that the person lies, but that is where the Olympics come into play; The effort and dedication of elite athletes make it unlikely that, even if they wanted to hide their emotions, they would be very successful in that mission. The tension and emotional burden associated with this type of competition is so high that the self-control aimed at regulating these types of details becomes rather weak. Therefore, Your expressions and gestures should be relatively reliable
After several students rated the athletes’ reactions right after winning their medal on a scale of 10, with the lowest value being the idea of ”suffering” and the highest being “ecstasy,” The researchers studied the means of these scores to see what they found
Silver or bronze? Less is more
The results obtained by this team of researchers were surprising. Contrary to what common sense would dictate, those people who won a silver medal were no happier than those who won bronze In fact, the opposite was true. Based on the images recorded just after the athletes’ results were known, the silver medal winners were scored with an average of 4.8 on the scale, while the group of those who won a bronze obtained an average of 7.1.
Regarding the scores made on the images of the awards ceremony held somewhat later, the scores were 4.3 for the silver medalists and 5.7 for the bronze medalists. The latter continued to win, the third parties in contention
What had happened? Possible hypotheses for this phenomenon
The possible explanation for this phenomenon destroyed the conception of the human being who objectively values his achievements, and has to do with comparisons and expectations in the context of performing the exercise. The athletes who won the silver medal had aspired to the gold medal while those who had received the bronze expected to win either that prize or nothing.
The emotional reaction, therefore, has a lot to do with the imagined alternative: silver medalists can torture themselves by thinking about what could have happened if they had tried a little harder or if they had made a different decision, while those who win the bronze medal think of an alternative that is equivalent to not having won any medal, since this is the scenario closest to their real situation and with greater emotional implications
