When the Paris Olympic Games start this month, many of the athletes who won a bronze medal will leave elated with their result, while many silver medalists will leave disappointed.

Why? After all, the bronze medalists finished in third place, lower than the silver medalists who finished in second. 

Yet, a UIowa researcher found that the lower-place finisher is often happier with their outcome than the athlete who beat them. Andrea Luangrath, TCOB marketing professor, analyzed photos of track and field medal winners between 2000 and 2016 by scanning them with artificial intelligence technology. The AI software can read a person’s facial expression by the shapes and positions of their mouths, eyes, eyebrows, noses, and other parts of the face. 

The analysis found bronze medalists are more likely to be smiling during the medal ceremony than are silver medalists, who are less likely to smile themselves, or to have an insincere “smile for the camera” smile, if they performed worse than expected. 

Luangrath said researchers have found two reasons for this result. In some cases, she said silver medalists compare their finish to the gold medalists and are disappointed to be oh-so-close, but yet so far. Bronze medalists, on the other hand, compare their result to the fourth-place finisher and are just happy to be on the podium. 

In other cases, silver medalists are disappointed with their result because they felt they should have performed better.