No, really. Take a moment and picture their emotions. Visualize what they felt like after years of training and hours of struggle culminated in the ultimate athletic prize.
Since 1872, when Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, scientists have explored how facial expressions reveal our moods. We often try to conceal our feelings—to display humility instead of pride or resolve instead of heartbreak—but our faces can betray us. And at the podium ceremony following this race, the faces of these Olympic winners disclosed their emotions.
Here, in part of a photo taken by Tim de Waele, is the smiling winner after receiving her gold medal:
Here is the almost equally elated silver medalist:
And here is the pleased—but not totally thrilled—third-place finisher after receiving her bronze:
Even world-class athletes are emotional creatures. And at this epochal moment in their careers, their emotions are unmistakable. The finishers ascend in positivity—happy, happier, happiest.
Faces don’t lie.
But authors sometimes do. And I’ve been lying to you.
Here is de Waele’s entire photograph of the 2016 Olympic women’s road race podium:
Photo credit: Tim de Waele, Getty Images
The beaming athlete in the middle is indeed the gold medalist, Anna van der Breggen. But the very happy woman to her left (and your right) is Elisa Longo Borghini, the Italian rider who finished third. The least gleeful of the trio is silver medalist Emma Johansson.
In other words, the person with the worst of the three outcomes (Borghini) looks happier than one of the people who beat her (Johansson). And this is not some aberrant photo, even though there are images of Johansson smiling that day. Consider the athletes’ reactions immediately after they crossed the finish line. Gold medalist van der Breggen raised both arms in triumph. Bronze medalist Borghini began high-fiving an invisible partner. Silver medalist Johansson buried her head in her hands. Nor is the emotional contrast the result of failed expectations. Borghini came into the race ranked higher than Johansson and expected to do better.
What you see on these Olympian faces is instead a phenomenon that behavioral scientists identified more than twenty-five years ago that opens another window into understanding regret.
THE THRILL OF DEFEAT AND THE AGONY OF VICTORY
The human superpower I described in Chapter 2—our ability to mentally travel through time and to conjure incidents and outcomes that never happened—enables what logicians call “counterfactual thinking.” Split the adjective in two and its meaning is evident. We can concoct events that run counter to the actual facts. “Counterfactuals are . . . a signature example of the imagination and creativity that stand at the intersection of thinking and feeling,” say Neal Roese of Northwestern University and Kai Epstude of the University of Groningen, two leading scholars of the subject.[1] Counterfactuals permit us to imagine what might have been.
One of the clearest demonstrations of their impact comes from the Olympics. In a now famous study of the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Victoria Medvec and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University and Scott Madey of the University of Toledo collected videos of about three dozen silver and bronze medalists. They presented the videos to a group of participants who didn’t know much about sports and hadn’t paid attention to the games. Participants observed the athletes, but not during competitions. They watched them—with the final results hidden—in the immediate aftermath of their events and on the medal podium. Then they rated the competitors’ facial expressions on a ten-point “agony-to-ecstasy” scale that I’ve reproduced below:
Olympic medalist agony-to-ecstacy scale
SOURCE: Medvec, Victoria Husted, Scott F. Madey, and Thomas Giovich. “When less is more: counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 4 (1995): 603.
The athletes who finished third appeared significantly happier than those who finished second. The average rating of the facial expressions of bronze medalists was 7.1. But silver medalists—people who’d just placed second in the most elite competition in the world—were neutral, even tilting slightly toward unhappy. Their rating: 4.8.
The reason, researchers concluded, was counterfactual thinking.
Counterfactuals can point in either of two directions—down or up. With “downward counterfactuals,” we contemplate how an alternative could have been worse. They prompt us to say “At least . . .”—as in, “Sure, I got a C+ on that exam, but at least I passed the course and don’t have to take it again.” Let’s call these types of counterfactuals At Leasts.
The other variety are known as “upward counterfactuals.” With upward counterfactuals, we imagine how things could have gone better. They make us say “If only . . .”—as in, “If only I’d attended class more often and done all the reading, I’d have gotten a much better grade.” Let’s call these counterfactuals If Onlys.
When researchers reviewed competitors’ post-event television interviews, they found the bronze medalists happily humming At Leasts. “At least I didn’t finish fourth. At least I got a medal!” Silver medalists, though, were wracked with If Onlys. And that hurt. “Second place is only one step away from the cherished gold medal and all of its attendant social and financial rewards,” Medvec and her colleagues wrote. “Thus, whatever joy the silver medalist may feel is often tempered by tortuous thoughts of what might have been had she only lengthened her stride, adjusted her breathing, pointed her toes, and so on.”[2]
The idea that people who finish higher feel worse is provocative—the sort of alluring discovery that captures headlines and enraptures social media. For the last decade, social science has contended with what some have called a “replication crisis.”?[3] Many findings, especially those that seem most surprising and newsworthy, don’t hold up on closer examination. When other scholars rerun the experiments, they often don’t produce the same tantalizing results, calling into question the validity of the earlier findings.