The 1992 Barcelona Olympics not only changed this city forever and made it the capital of Mediterranean tourism that it is today (for better and for worse), but also left us with one of the most curious investigations into psychology applied to sport and the achievement of personal goals.

One of a series of researches that in the 90s made psychology turn around what was known about motivation and the perception of the value of things. Basically, it showed that, under certain conditions, people who perform better on a task can be much less satisfied and happy than those who obtain not so good results .

Breaking Paradigms

For a long time, in the field of research in psychology and economics, it has been believed that our way of reacting to certain facts and experiences corresponds to the degree to which these are objectively positive or negative for us.

Of course, total objectivity is not useful, but in this context it was understood that an objectively positive result is one in which we gain in security, social recognition and probabilities of receiving pleasant stimuli grow and come to compensate the efforts, resources and time invested in making this experience come to fruition.

In other words, the positive was linked to an economicist 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.

Applying Common Sense to the Olympics

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 utility is that of being a more valuable object than the rest of the trophies . As all sportsmen and women believe that a gold medal is better than a silver or a bronze one, 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 the last decades , after several investigations showed how irrational we are when it comes to valuing our achievements and the results of our decisions, even when these have not yet been taken and what can happen if we choose one option or another is being foreseen. 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 medal to see to what extent their degree of anger or joy corresponded to the objective value of their trophy . In order to carry out the study, we worked on the assumption that “the face is the mirror of the soul”, that is, from the interpretation of facial expressions, a group of judges can come to imagine in a very approximate way the emotional state of the person in question.

Of course, there is always the possibility that a person will lie, but that is where the Olympics come in; the effort and dedication of elite athletes make it unlikely that, even if they wanted to hide their emotions, they would be too successful in that mission. The tension and emotional charge associated with this type of competition is so high that the self-control aimed at regulating this type of detail becomes rather weak. Therefore, their expressions and gestures should be relatively reliable .

After several students scored on a scale of 10 the reactions of the athletes just after winning their medal, 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 who won a silver medal were no happier than those who got the bronze . In fact, the opposite was true. Based on the images recorded just after the results of the athletes 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 got an average of 7.1.

As for the scores given to the images at the award ceremony held a little later, the scores were 4.3 for the silver medalists and 5.7 for the bronze medalists. The latter continued to win, the third in discord .

What had happened? Possible hypotheses to this phenomenon

The possible explanation of this phenomenon was to do with the conception of the human being who objectively values his or her achievements, and has to do with comparisons and expectations in the context of the realization of the exercise. The athletes who won the silver medal had aspired to the gold medal , while those who had received the bronze were expected to win either that prize or nothing.

The emotional reaction, therefore, has a lot to do with the imagined alternative: the silver medalists may torture themselves thinking about what could have happened if they had made a little more effort or if they had taken another 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 .