The Olympic Medal That Makes People Mad and Sad

Looking back at the 1912 Olympics, Abel Kiviat (June 23, 1892 – August 24, 1991) said, “I wake up sometimes and say, ‘What the heck happened to me?’ It’s like a nightmare.”

He lost the 1,500 meter race by one-tenth of a second:

Abel Kiviat responded like many silver medal winners.

Silver Medal Winners

Silver medal winners tend to be less happy than the athletes who won bronze.

In one paper, psychologists used shots of 20 silver and 15 bronze 1992 medal winners. Study participants then rated the expressions on a 1 to 10, agony to ecstasy scale in which 1 is agony and 10 is ecstasy. The mean for the silver medalists was 4.8 whereas bronze was 7.1. Measured another time, the silver average was 4.3 and bronze, 5.7.

You can see that bronze winners, in the bars on the right, have higher happy scores:

But more than a graph, this silver medal winning hockey team says it all.

At Sochi, 2014, the Canadians got the gold and the Swiss, the bronze. They were ecstatic but not the US team:

Or gymnast McKayla Maroney had the classic silver medal face in 2012:

Our Bottom Line: Reference Points

As a behavioral economist, we could say that silver and bronze medalists feel differently because of their reference points. Reference points come in handy as a tool for assessing an accomplishment. At work we will be unhappy with a 5% raise when an associate gets 7%. If our stock portfolio plunges, we don’t feel so bad if the S&P declined even more.

Similarly, silver medalists focus on the counterfactual that could have been. They think, “if only…” and “why didn’t I just…” By contrast, bronze winners tend to take pride in having won a medal and topping so many other competitors. The silver medalist focuses “upward” on the gold winner as his or her reference point. Meanwhile the bronze thinks “downward” about the fourth place (and lower) she thankfully avoided.

As economist John List explained, we can do “gain framing” or “loss framing.” For humans, the pain of loss is more intense than the joy of gain. The silver medalists are in the loss group while bronze feels the gain.

My sources and more: You might enjoy (as did I) starting with a Hidden Brain podcast. From there, the articles about medal winners’ emotions came from The Washington Post, NPR, and the University of Iowa. Then, if you want the academic perspective, do take a look here, here, and here. And for the most up-to-date insight, this article from economist John List is ideal. Please also note that some of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post and the McKayla Maroney photo is from the AP/Julie Jacobson.