Study found bronze medal-winners tended to be happier than silver medalists | Hacker News Reader

Study found bronze medal-winners tended to be happier than silver medalists

npr.org

There are usually only 2-3 athletes with a significant chance of winning the gold medal (where 80%+ chance one of those athletes ends up with the gold).

I'd imagine silver ends up being one of those gold competitors more often, meaning the result was a disappointment relative to their hope. On the other hand, bronze ends up being one of the competitors from the field more often, meaning that medalling at all was a great outcome compared to what they realistically could have expected.

I've mostly been watching Judo this olympics, since it's the sport I'm focusing on personally, and this observation shows itself on a match-by-match basis. The competitors with the best chance of winning it all are calm and already thinking about their next match after a victory. The competitors that don't have a realistic chance of winning it all are jumping up and down, fist-pumping, etc in a round-of-32 victory.

I imagine it's really just expectation vs result, which is not really a new or unique phenomenon at all.

> There are usually only 2-3 athletes with a significant chance of winning the gold medal

I do not know where you got those numbers from, but I don't see how could possibly be true for any one sport, let alone for all sports with competitors quire literally from all over the world.

As someone else mentioned in the thread,the silver medalist is likely thinking "I almost won gold, if only I had done a little better", while the bronze medalist knows that are a notch away from gold, so they are thinking "I almost failed to make it to the podium, woohoo!"

Seinfeld encapsulates this phenomenon perfectly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK9rbwM3omA

Though his "it's better to be next than first" bit kind of refutes it. :)

Was wondering how long it would take for this to come up. :)

1 just missed winning, 1 just missed getting nothing.

For the 1-1 and head-to-head team events:

Silver: You lost your last match, finishing on a low note.

Bronze: You won your last match, finishing on a high note.

The last few paragraphs of the article discuss that:

> So the researchers eliminated sports with that playoff structure, and looked only at events where gold, silver and bronze medal-winners were decided at the same time. They found the pattern held up.

Or: "Wow, I unexpectedly got a medal!" versus "I was edged out of gold!"

> The psychologists guessed it was because silver medal-winners compare themselves to the athletes who won gold and feel they came up short. By contrast, bronze medal-winners seem to unconsciously compare themselves to people who didn't win a medal at all.

Bronze: the Gold Medal among also-rans.

It'd be interesting to see the respective happiness of silver and bronze medallists in the context of prior expectations (e.g. betting odds). Presumably silver medallists are more likely to have been the pre-competition favourite to win and bronze medallists are more likely to have not expected to finish on the podium: are silver medallists much happier when they finish behind a massive favourite they never expected to beat, and are bronze medallists significantly less chuffed when the odds suggested they were widely expected to finish somewhere in the top three?

Context of the anecdote the article opens with: Lochte - one of the finest swimmers of all time - got overtaken on his relay leg in a race his team was leading at the time and was expected to get a medal in anyway. Hansen was delighted with bronze in his final Olympics having finished fourth and just missed out on a medal in the same event four years earlier.

You raise the good point that it's possible for someone to have a strong expectation for bronze; to have the sense that they have a reservation in third place. But then the probability comes into effect of what is the likelihood that a given bronze medalist falls into this disappointed category versus the "oh wow, I bronzed against all expectations".

Definitely true. I was in Beijing to see a couple friends competing in the 2008 Olympics. (Rowing events; a 2km race that takes ~6.5 minutes).

One friend got bronze, but was <0.25 second from gold. She was ecstatic! Another friend got silver, and was >1 second from winning. She was massively sad/depressed. (Part of that was expectations; the woman who got silver was 100% focused on gold and gold only.)

I had heard this saying before (that bronze medalists were happier than silver medalists), but seeing it up close and personal right after their races was eye-opening.

At Amazon years ago, a director once told me "SDE3s are very happy, SDE1s are just happy to be here, and every SDE2 thinks he should be a SDE3."

I assumed SDE1s were the best and SDE3 were beginners and it was a much more profound statement :)

Here's a photo I saw earlier, kinda reinforcing the idea.

ie: http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/5024234_700b.jpg

The Chinese athletes get a nice reward for getting a gold. And I'm not sure they have the endorsement opportunities other countries have. The financial incentives may be the only reason they train.

Anecdote - In Australia, I see very, very few non-westernised Asians participate in exercise or sports.

To put concrete terms on "reward", it translates to like >$30000 cash from the national government (already 3x median household income), and additionally sometimes rewards from provincial government, luxury cars, and houses.

Counter point http://www.smh.com.au/sport/olympics/rio-2016/olympics-swimm...

So some of the Chinese are having a good time :D !

good stuff!

You must play the wrong sports then. Check out the private school badminton teams, for example.

Chinese male gymnasts just got bronze behind Japan and Russia in the team event, and were clearly pissed off about it.

I am reminded of a quote "Happiness is living without expectations"

The favorites in a competition will have much higher expectations than the rest.

It makes sense. A Bronze medal winner is just happy that he or she is still taking home something, while a Silver medal winner is tormented that he or she just missed out on the Gold.

The worst has to be 4th place, you get nothing at all to take home but memories.

That would have been a much more interesting study. How does coming in 4th affect the lives of Olympians? You went from "glad I got on the stand" to "watching the winners".

Fourth has to feel worse than last. If you're last, you just got beaten by everyone. They were all superior athletes on that day but fourth has to feel awful.

In my sport we race for at a time. We typically run a consolation for positions 5-8. Several people said they would rather finish fifth than fourth, as they would rather win the consolation than lose the podium.

Second is the first loser. Third is the best of the rest.

There was an old video game store blog that had a story on the game tournaments that were played at the store. The owner gave 1st and 3rd good prizes (game, joystick, etc.), but gave the second place person a can of pop to remind them they were "1st loser". Cannot remember the name of that thing.

Not going to lie, that silver in JiuJitsu has lingered in my brain for a couple years now :)

I bet silver is happier than 4th place

Not related, but I had a hierarchy for grade happiness as a kid. 19/20 was superior to both 18/20 and 20/20. 17/20 was better than 16/20 and 18/20.

19 looked sophisticated, a calm mature lion or an eagle flying high. 17 looked like a very sharp shark or a young powerful wolf.

So you liked odd numerators? Or unreducible fractions?

Prime>Odd>Even..

However, 17 was superior to 18 in my mind aesthetically, not numerically. If you'd make me choose between receiving $18MM or $17MM, I'm not above receiving an extra one.

Sounds like you might have a form of synesthesia, look into it!

I guess. I had (and still have) all kinds of images but I guess everybody has them.

Like for instance, in high-school when learning derivation and integration.. I'd always imagine sine to be a dominant almost bullying function (starts with an "S", looks erect like a snake about to jump at you), and cosine to be the submissive one (starts with a C, curved back). In many ways, the Sine behaves like a treacherous snake you have to handle more carefully than a Cosine.

Some formulas invoked musical tones and melodies in my mind (like the integration by parts has a specific melody I can hear).

The Sarrus method for calculating determinants was always the difference of two stars of David.

Other things are almost muscular. I used to know every phone number in my contact list for it only existed in my head (pushed numbers when I wanted to call someone). I remembered the numbers because the thumb followed a certain pattern on the keypad and each pattern was unique. Sometimes someone's phone number evoked things that were pertinent about the person.

Those are very interesting experiences! Most people do not have images like these, actually, even though it sounds normal to you since you've experienced it your whole life. I've done some research on synesthesia because it fascinates me, but I have never attributed personalities to numbers or formulas (or made other synesthetic connections). Thank you very much for sharing.

I always thought Michael Collins was more comfortable with his place in history than Buzz or Neil, too.

So close, yet so far - Michael Collins

Thats it, I'm no longer going to strive to be the best...just better than the rest will do.

with animals you have a similar story: the alpha ape is living a very stressed life, because he has to maintain his position against all these upshots, while the position of beta ape is in much more relaxed (i don't know if there is a gamma ape)

maybe the alpha ape also has some headache because of the demands of his many wives, but here i am speculating.

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