Winning Athlete's First Reaction to Victory is to Display Dominance

What's your first reaction when you win something? For an athlete, it's not very sportsmanlike. Scientists have shown that an athlete's first, instinctive reaction is to display dominance over his opponent.

The body language in question is known as a "dominance threat display" and is labeled as "triumph" in other studies. It's been seen in the winners of Olympic and Paralympic judo matchers, and appears to be innate. Researchers believe that it probably stems from an evolutionary need to establish order and hierarchy in society. Despite knowing this, though, researchers weren't sure whether expressions of triumph are the immediate action of an athlete following victory.

In order to find that out, the scientists first looked at the first body motion made by an athlete upon learning he or she was victorious. They then determined whether the action was among those to constitute "triumph." After, they rated the intensity of the action on a five-point scale.

So what exactly is considered to be triumphant? Actions include raising the arms above the shoulders, pushing the chest out, tilting the head back and smiling. The researchers witnessed all of these actions in winning athletes from all cultural backgrounds and even in blind Paralympic athletes right after victory. These suggested that the actions were innate.

"It is a very quick, immediate, universal expression that is produced by many different people, in many cultures, immediately after winning their combat," said David Matsumoto, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Many animals seem to have a dominant threat display that involves making their body look larger."

That's not all that the researchers found, either. They also noticed that the intensity of an athlete's expression depended on his culture's "power distance" (PD). This measurement represents the degree to which a culture encourages or discourages power, status and hierarchical differences among groups. They found that countries with high PD include Malaysia, Slovakia and Romania, while countries with low PD include Israel, Austria and Finland.

The findings reveal a bit more about how humans display dominance. More specifically, it shows how culture can influence these reactions and reveals how it's an innate reaction.

The findings are published in the journals Motivation and Emotion and Cross Cultural Research.