Hi everybody this is Scott Sad.

Earlier this morning I was watching the final

the women's Olympic gold medal game between

Canada and

Canada went on penalty kicks I'm very happy for that.

Hopefully one day my daughter will be representing Canada.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Any case I was thinking about how disappointing would be for the team that would end up losing because they would have come so close to winning the gold.

And it reminded me of a study from many years ago, actually the Cornell link, and some of you know that I got my PhD

at Cornell and so this is a paper that was published in 1995 just after I

finished my PhD I finished in 94. It was authored by one of my doctoral cohorts. Her name is

Vicky Medveck. She's now a professor last I checked at Northwestern University and along with one of my former psychology professors of Cornell, Tom Gillievich, and the third person is Scott F Maddie. This was published in the

Journal of Social Psychology in 1995 and what they looked at is who is happier the bronze medal winners or the

silver ones now you would think again from a quote rational perspective if you win the silver

medal then you're happier than if you win the bronze but the argument of

course in this case and what made the paper so interesting is that if you win the bronze so let's

say you're playing a semi-final match you lose so then you play for the third place match the two

semi-final losers play the bronze medal game well then the the

comparison is between you getting a medal or not being on the podium, you finish forth.

And so when you win the bronze medal, you've meddled, quote, and therefore you're happy.

Whereas when you win the silver the you know the

what you're comparing it to is what would have happened had I won the gold and

...