A minipost
There's a common signal that emerges when you talk to elite athletes about how they feel about their final position. Universally they say bronze medals feel better than silvers and fourth place is the worst in single elimination play with quarter and semifinals.
Sarah, in particular, has gone into detail. She notes the goal, given the depth in her sport, is a podium finish, Just missing feels awful. If you're eliminated before that, you tend to move on towards the next tournament. Taking third means that you've redeemed an earlier loss by winning. Second means - "if only..."
While there's variation in measuring how athletes feel and well as variation among athletes, several studies confirm this ordering. Explanations generally boil down to counterfactual thinking. In one type, known as ex post counterfactuals, you think about alternate pasts. "if I had only delayed my block by a quarter of a second, we could have won" or "if it wasn't for them serving into the net we could have lost." The other type, known as ex ante counterfactuals, is described by dwelling on what was expected to be: "everyone thought we'd take gold, but we failed or "no one thought we'd qualify and look how far we got."
A silver medalist tends to focus on the negative ex post counterfactual. It's even worse when there's a negative ex ante counterfactual - an expectation of taking gold. Fourth place follows a similar pattern plus you don't even get to stand on the podium. Athletes really hate fourths.
Of course counterfactual thinking, positive and negative, exists in many other places.
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