The motivational properties of hope in goal striving

ABSTRACT

We argue that hope is not an expectancy based on beliefs about pathways to desired goals and personal capacities to act on them, but an experience of the mere possibility of a desired outcome. We propose that in the latter sense, hope has unique motivational consequences for goal striving. Specifically, we predicted that hope buffers against the detrimental impact of negative feedback on goal-progress. The results of the two studies confirmed this prediction. In Study 1, we measured participants’ hopes of attaining a weight-loss goal. In Study 2, we induced hope at solving an unsolvable mathematical puzzle. In both studies, receiving negative feedback on goal-progress resulted in lower levels of success (Study 1) and persistence (Study 2) in goal-striving, but not for participants who experienced hope. We discuss the role of hope as an affective mechanism that functions to regulate energy expenditure in goal-striving.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• expectancy
• goal-striving
• effort
• motivation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable contributions, which substantially improved the conceptual clarity, completeness and accuracy of the present manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The survey included additional measures of variables that are irrelevant to the research discussed in the present paper. A full questionnaire, including all the items in the survey, is available upon request from the first author.

2 The reliability of the Commitment scale did not improve from removing one or more items. We therefore decided to retain the measure as it was assessed in previous research (Klein et al., 2001).

3 Omitting goal-commitment and optimism as predictors in the regression model rendered the main effect of expectancy statistically significant. It did not change the significance of the other main effects nor of the interactions.

4 Expectancy was originally measured using two items in Study 2. Based on a suggestion from an anonymous reviewer, we decided to drop the second item (“I have a good feeling about solving the puzzle first”) to make the hope and expectancy measures more consistent. This did not substantially affect the outcome of the analyses reported in Study 2. Other than that, the present report includes all the measures and conditions of the study. We did not exclude any participant, unless explicitly stated otherwise.