Silver Medal Winners – The Daily Blog on Behavioral and Cognitive Economics

The Olympic medal that makes people angry and sad

Looking back on the 1912 Olympics, Abel Kiviat (June 23, 1892 – August 24, 1991) said, “Sometimes I wake up and think, ‘What happened to me?’ It’s like a nightmare.” He lost the 1500 meters by a tenth of a second:Abel Kiviat reacted like many silver medalists. Silver medalists tend to be less happy than athletes who won bronze. In a paper, psychologists used photographs of 20 silver and 15 bronze medalists from 1992. Participants in the study then rated the facial expressions on a scale of 1 to 10, from terror to ecstasy, with 1 being terror and 10 being ecstasy. ….(READ)