In a sport like hockey you have 4 teams playing in two games, and in one game the winner gets gold, and the loser gets silver, vs the other game where you have the winner get bronze and the loser gets to watch the bronze team get a medal and they go home with nothing but a loss. So, yeah, of course it feels good to be on the brink of elimination and go home with a medal vs being so close to winning it all and losing the match.
Now in individual sports like down hill skiing, or something I have seen reactions that span all emotions…silver being totally happy they won because they set a personal best, weren’t expected to win, etc, to bronze being totally bummed they didn’t get gold or silver, and bronze being totally happy with the fact that got a metal at all.
In other sports it could be about how the event went down, if you are directly competing against your opponent there are other factors that go into it than when you are just competing against a time that was set by a future or past racer on the same course. Things like, was I bumped, was I interfered with…If you are bumped on the course in say, speed skating, and you “only” win bronze when you feel like you should have won gold in a clean race…pretty sure that athlete will not be happy. And same goes as above, was the team expected to win gold but only got bronze vs not expecting to win at all and snuck out a bronze…this will greatly affect the team’s attitude to winning.
It almost seems like this may be more complicated than the article makes it sound.
A old girlfriend spent some time on the north shore in Hawaii. She said it was so humid that without the AC to keep the air dry you could hang up dry clothes at night and they would be damp in the morning.
You get it. To me it’s like not eating for a couple of days. That will not make me happier about being lucky enough to always have food, it will make me miserable for a couple of days.
Interesting. The theory that the bronze medalists are focused on their alternative being no medal didn’t occur to me. I was thinking they’d be happier because the contender who placed immediately above them still is not on top, i.e. spite lite. Not sure what that says about me. Oh carp, am I a Tahani?
Social and science don’t belong in the same sentence.
And yup, this whole appreciate your blessings thing stinks of “stay in your caste and be satisfied that you aren’t an untouchable”. In some other society, I would mull the veracity of living within and accepting your state and status, but it seems here, this sort of message is readily spouted by celebrities, Bill Gates, and other hyper-wealthy jerk-offs. They certainly don’t acknowledge the level of stagnation, precarity, and debt load that accompany life in these United States since the 70’s.
I think the difference isn’t team vs. individual as much as whether you have only two competitors in the final or whether you have more.
For instance, fencing is an individual sport, but the silver medallist is the person who loses the final, while the bronze medallist is the person who wins the bronze medal match. On the other hand, rowing is usually a team sport, but one with 6 boats in the final- the bronze medals go to the crew who finish 3rd.
(Boxing is kind of the exception here, both losing semi-finalists get bronze medals, possibly because they don’t want to make someone who just lost a boxing match fight again even with amateur rules).
