A shared universe › Blog › Hope and optimism are not the same thing · Español
Things look bad, you know it, and still you keep hoping they will turn out well. Nobody would say you were being optimistic. That mixture of knowing it may go wrong and still betting on it going right has a name, and psychology has found that it isn’t the same name as optimism.
In everyday speech, “having hope” and “being optimistic” seem to say the same thing. In psychology they have also been mixed up for years: some classifications of human strengths grouped them as one, and there were chapters devoted to optimism with the word “hope” in the title.
Optimism has a fairly clear definition. The psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver described it in 1985 as a general expectation that things will turn out well: a way of looking at the future that a person carries almost everywhere. The question is what is left when that expectation doesn’t hold up, when the facts don’t support it and yet something still pulls you forward.
In 2005, the psychologists Patricia Bruininks and Bertram Malle published three studies to see how hope differs from other similar states: optimism, wanting something, desiring it strongly, the “if only” of dreams, and joy.
First they asked 52 university students to explain what they understood by each of those words. Then 87 students described a real occasion when they had felt each one and rated three aspects: how important what they hoped for was to them, how likely it seemed at the start and how much it depended on them whether it turned out well. Finally, another group read almost three hundred of those stories, with the key word hidden, and had to guess what each was about.
The great majority described optimism as a way of thinking: looking on the bright side, trusting that all will go well. Hope, on the other hand, they described more often as something you feel than something you think.
When the stories were compared, three differences appeared. What was hoped for was more important to the person hoping, seemed less likely and depended less on what they could do. Optimism appeared more in situations where the person felt they held the reins.
The authors themselves explained it with simple examples:
The study has a limit: the participants were university students in the United States, and what was studied is how they understand and experience those words. Even so, the distinction helps put a name to something we often live through.
The most interesting thing about the work is the role of control. A good part of the psychology of hope, such as the theory of Charles Snyder described in what hope is, according to psychology, understands it in terms of goals and pathways: knowing where you want to go and seeing how to get there. Bruininks and Malle pointed out that this leaves out part of the experience: the hope of someone who can hardly do anything.
Many of the things we hope for most are of that kind: that an operation goes well, that a child finds their way, that someone we have argued with wants to speak to us again. As early as 1990, the psychologist James Averill and his team had seen that people often hope for things that depend on others, such as the wellbeing of a loved one, and that hope is hard to hold back: many people said they couldn’t help hoping.
That explains why we sometimes hope against the odds. In Bruininks and Malle’s studies, hope appeared even when the odds were not in its favour, and what seemed to sustain it was how much the thing hoped for mattered.
The state closest to hope turned out to be the “if only”, the wish for something unlikely. But the authors saw a difference: what is dreamed of is usually known to be almost impossible from the start, like winning the lottery, and we stop thinking about it quickly. Hope, on the other hand, keeps some expectation that it will happen, and so we keep thinking about what we hope for, give it time and put affection into it.
That is why hope can also be tiring. Keeping something important at the centre of your attention, without being able to resolve it, takes a lot of energy, and noticing that doesn’t mean you are hoping badly.
The Czech writer Václav Havel spent almost four years in prison, between 1979 and 1983, for opposing his country’s communist regime. Years later he became president of Czechoslovakia and, later still, of the Czech Republic. In the mid-1980s, in long conversations with the journalist Karel Hvížďala that were later published as a book, he spoke about hope.
For Havel, having hope was not being convinced that something will turn out well. It was knowing that what one does or hopes for is worthwhile, whatever the outcome. He saw it as something carried within and not dependent on how things were going outside, and so he thought it could exist in situations where there was no reason at all to be optimistic.
What Havel described from his own experience matches what Bruininks and Malle found with their questionnaires: hope doesn’t need good odds in order to exist.
Knowing that they are two different things has practical consequences:
Hope doesn’t need everything to add up. Write what you hope for on a star with “What I hope for”, for yourself or for someone you love. The words of hope others leave you won’t change what comes, but they will keep you company while it arrives.