"I have a problem with that silver medal. It's like, 'Congratulation s, you almost won. Of all the losers, you're the number one loser. No one lost ahead of you." Jerry Seinfeld
Silver Medal Syndrome season is upon us again, and it always points to a fascinating part of human psychology that prevents us from being happy. This is the demonstrated phenomenon of the Olympics that silver medal winners are generally less happy than bronze medal winners, even though 2nd place is demonstrably better than 3rd place.
There have been scientific studies on this weird syndrome after so many people have noticed the joy on the faces of gold and bronze medal winners, and the visibly disappointed facial expressions of the silver medal winners. The idea took hold especially during the 2012 Olympic gymnastics competition, when silver medal winner McKayla Moroney (pictured above) focused just a bit too long on the fall that cost her the gold medal. This face made her famous and the butt of jokes ever since.
Finishing in second place is demonstrably better than finishing in 3rd, 4th, 5th, or lower places, but for some odd reason it has a stigma attached to it. How can that be?
Behavioral psychologists pin the blame on our tendency to think about what might have been had everything worked out the way we imagined it. They call it counterfactual thinking. Silver medalists look upwards at gold medalists and feel bad about coming in second. Bronze medalists look downwards at all the athletes who didn't get a medal at all and feel lucky to be on the podium. And athletes who leave without any medals have the choice to feel disappointed, or to feel grateful for even making the Olympic team in the first place.
In other words, our happiness often depends on how we compare our outcomes with the rest of the world's outcomes. Do we have a gain frame of mind, where every loss is a chance to learn, or do we have a loss frame, where every loss is a failure to be ashamed of? It makes me sad to think of all the gifted and talented people out there who compare themselves to unrealistic expectations without giving themselves credit for how far they came.
Billionaires constantly compare themselves to other billionaires and are always trying to one-up each other in possessions, power, and net wealth. Beautiful young women feel awful about their looks because they actually believe the bs that the beauty industry lays down about what constitutes beauty. Social media is filled with "influencers" who regularly check their followers to see how far up the ladder they fall. It's not bad to want to improve, but to set all-consuming, unrealistic expectations can be destructive.
Loss aversion is another behavioral psychology trap. We hate to lose anything to such an extent we will avoid anything that risks a painful loss. Is a second place finish truly a loss? It depends on how you look at it. There can only be so many first-place finishers, 1 percenters, and NBA stars. I look at the Silver Medal Syndrome and feel bad for those talented athletes who might spend years replaying competitions trying to figure out what went wrong.
Almost always, something goes wrong. That's life. Expecting perfection and never losing is a psychological trap. Going after a student for a single B grade on a report card full of A's sends a terrible lesson. We are all here on earth to learn things, and we all sit at different points to learn different things. Comparing our lives to someone else's robs us of our power and agency. A gain frame, also known as a growth mindset, acknowledges that losses will happen, and they are there to teach us something. In the end, we all lose by dying, and the lessons we learn along the way are what makes life worth living.
Every gold medal winner deserves the praise that they earned. So do all the other competitors. But after the competition is over, life goes on and new lessons need to be learned. Focusing on what could have been in the past is rarely helpful. What's done is done. What we take from it is very much up to us.
Comments