Very much obsessed with the Olympics too🤩 And I'd be a great experiment participant to see how the fans themselves feel about their country's medals. I'm Serbian and totally thrilled we have our 2 golds, but I doubt my American friends would feel the same about having scored two tiny medals!
I also find it fascinating to observe cultural differences in how emotions are *expressed* and that can have a huge impact on the research. For example, the reactions of the France vs South Korea archery medalists were *so* distinctly different, you would have thought the South Korean medalist wasn't as 'happy' as her French counterpart. But cultural expectations around emotional expression play a huge role in all of this.
Great article. The counterfactual explanation is especially visible when gold and silver are decided by a tiny margin. A great example is the 100m final from a few days ago: it was so close that they had to wait maybe 30 seconds looking at the screens while the video was checked for a photo finish. If you think you may have won gold—or even worse, if you think you've *probably* won gold—it must be intensely disappointing when you realize you were second. I feel like silver medalists usually look a lot happier when the gold medalist ran away with it unambiguously :)
Did you hear/read that the fencing team is mostly from Harvard? And that one gold medal fencing winner is on hiatus from medical school. Everyone in her family is a doctor who fences. So interesting. Maybe fencing is like surgery - fast.
I always found this research interesting, we had shared this with our oldest and then he started observing people's faces at the end of events. Perhaps a researcher in our midst...
Very interesting! I recently read a piece in the Guardian about former British cyclist Victoria Pendleton. She said when she thinks back to the 2012 Olympics, she still mostly feels disappointment. In the 3 races she was in, she got one Gold, one Silver, and one no medal, whereas she went into it with the hopes of 3 golds. She had a lot going on that fed into this thinking, but a stark example of negative counterfactual thinking!
Very much obsessed with the Olympics too🤩 And I'd be a great experiment participant to see how the fans themselves feel about their country's medals. I'm Serbian and totally thrilled we have our 2 golds, but I doubt my American friends would feel the same about having scored two tiny medals!
I also find it fascinating to observe cultural differences in how emotions are *expressed* and that can have a huge impact on the research. For example, the reactions of the France vs South Korea archery medalists were *so* distinctly different, you would have thought the South Korean medalist wasn't as 'happy' as her French counterpart. But cultural expectations around emotional expression play a huge role in all of this.
(Sorry, geeked out here for a sec!)
Great article. The counterfactual explanation is especially visible when gold and silver are decided by a tiny margin. A great example is the 100m final from a few days ago: it was so close that they had to wait maybe 30 seconds looking at the screens while the video was checked for a photo finish. If you think you may have won gold—or even worse, if you think you've *probably* won gold—it must be intensely disappointing when you realize you were second. I feel like silver medalists usually look a lot happier when the gold medalist ran away with it unambiguously :)
Did you hear/read that the fencing team is mostly from Harvard? And that one gold medal fencing winner is on hiatus from medical school. Everyone in her family is a doctor who fences. So interesting. Maybe fencing is like surgery - fast.
I always found this research interesting, we had shared this with our oldest and then he started observing people's faces at the end of events. Perhaps a researcher in our midst...
Very interesting! I recently read a piece in the Guardian about former British cyclist Victoria Pendleton. She said when she thinks back to the 2012 Olympics, she still mostly feels disappointment. In the 3 races she was in, she got one Gold, one Silver, and one no medal, whereas she went into it with the hopes of 3 golds. She had a lot going on that fed into this thinking, but a stark example of negative counterfactual thinking!