Summary: Facial expression analysis shows bronze medalists were more likely to smile on the podium than silver medalists, while gold medalists displayed the happiest expressions overall.
Source: University of Minnesota
This Friday, when the Summer Olympics begin in Tokyo, gold, silver and bronze medals will be awarded across more than 300 events. Earlier research—based on observers manually coding photos—found that bronze medalists often appeared happier than silver medalists. The reasons for that counterintuitive finding have been debated for years.
New research from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, brings fresh evidence by using automated facial expression software to reduce observer bias. The study was led by William Hedgcock, an associate professor of marketing at the Carlson School.
Hedgcock and his colleagues built the largest dataset to date on this topic and are the first to apply commercial facial expression analysis tools to Olympic podium images. They gathered photographs of 413 medalists from 142 events, representing 67 countries across five Summer Olympic Games from 2000 through 2016. Using automated facial coding, the team compared the facial expressions of gold, silver and bronze medalists both to their finishing position and to pre-event expectations about how they were predicted to finish.
The results confirmed and extended earlier findings: bronze medalists were indeed more likely to show smiles on the podium than silver medalists, while gold medalists displayed the most positive facial expressions of all. Importantly, the automated approach helped minimize human coding bias and allowed the researchers to analyze a much larger and more diverse set of images than prior manual studies.
Two key explanations supported by the analysis draw on the psychological concept of counterfactual thinking—how people mentally compare actual outcomes with imagined alternatives. The first explanation is category-based counterfactuals: silver medalists tend to make upward comparisons, thinking “I almost won gold,” which highlights what they missed. Bronze medalists, by contrast, often make downward comparisons, focusing on “at least I won a medal” and on having beaten the fourth-place finisher. The second explanation is expectation-based counterfactuals: athletes’ prior expectations influence their emotional reactions, so silver medalists are often more disappointed because they entered the competition expecting better finishes than bronze medalists did.
“Now we have a clearer picture of why athletes who performed better on objective measures—silver versus bronze—may nevertheless look less happy,” Hedgcock said. He noted that the mechanisms driving those reactions are not unique to sport: upward and downward comparisons and expectation-based responses influence everyday experiences such as work performance, academic results, and consumer choices.
Hedgcock also emphasized the broader methodological implication: although commercial facial expression software has mainly been validated in tightly controlled laboratory settings, this project shows it can be effective for large-scale, real-world image analysis. That opens the door to more extensive and less biased research on emotional expressions in natural contexts.
About this facial expression research news
Source: University of Minnesota
Contact: Press Office – University of Minnesota
Image: The image is credited to University of Minnesota
Original Research: Closed access. “Counterfactual thinking and facial expressions among Olympic medalists: A conceptual replication of Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich’s (1995) findings” by Hedgcock, W. M., Luangrath, A. W., & Webster, R., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Abstract
Counterfactual thinking and facial expressions among Olympic medalists: A conceptual replication of Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich’s (1995) findings
Counterfactual thinking—the mental simulation of “what might have been”—shapes how Olympic medalists express emotion after competition. Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich (1995) originally documented that bronze medalists appeared happier than silver medalists on the podium. Two main explanations for that pattern are category-based and expectation-based counterfactuals.
Category-based counterfactuals suggest that silver medalists compare themselves upward to gold medalists and focus on narrowly missing the top spot, while bronze medalists compare themselves downward to fourth place and derive satisfaction from securing a medal. Expectation-based counterfactuals propose that athletes’ pre-competition expectations drive emotional responses, with silver medalists often having higher expectations and therefore greater disappointment when those expectations are not met.
To evaluate these accounts, the researchers compiled a large set of podium photographs from the Olympic Multimedia Library and Getty Images for the 2000–2016 Games and incorporated Sports Illustrated’s pre-event predictions to capture expectation data. Applying automated facial expression encoding, the study conceptually replicated prior work and found evidence supporting both category-based and expectation-based explanations for medalists’ differing facial expressions.
These findings advance our understanding of emotional expressions in competitive contexts and demonstrate the value of automated facial analysis for robust, large-scale studies of real-world images.