Photo by Carl Hunley Jr on Unsplash
Is hope just “a thing with feathers” as Dickenson wrote, or is it Aristotle’s “waking dream?”
Or instead. is it “a promise we live” rather than a “promise we give” as Amanda Gorman wrote in 2021.
According to new research examining the impact of hope as a positive emotion on long-term economic and social outcomes, it’s very much the Gorman definition.
That research presents evidence that not only is hope the least-studied dimension of positive emotional wellbeing, but that it’s also likely the most consequential in terms of long-term outcomes—beyond things like happiness or security.
Individuals in an Australian cohort of 25,000 randomly-sampled people that were more hopeful had on average improved wellbeing, education, economic, and employment outcomes measures years later, both better perceived health and objective measures of health, and were less likely to be lonely.
Hope in the researchers’ paper was also associated with higher resilience, the ability to adapt, and a robust internal locus of control. Hopeful individuals were also less likely to be influenced by negative life events and adapted more quickly and completely after these events.
Perhaps contrary to others’ definitions, the study authors defined hope as having a “strong grounding in individual agency.”
“Hope is not just a belief that things will get better (i.e., optimism), but the determination to make them better, which reflects agency and determination,” they wrote in their introduction. “The distinction between tragic optimists and hopeful pessimists is another way to think of this.”
Their data was pulled from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, which began collecting self-completed questionnaires in addition to face-to-face interviews with members of the Australian public over the age of 15 in 2001.
The data used in the study goes as far back as 2007, and includes the years 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021. The measurements of hope were simply the reverse measurements for one of the survey questions on psychological distress which read, “In the past 4 weeks, how often have you felt hopeless?”
69% of respondents said “all of the time” over the last 4 weeks, and 18% said “most of the time.”
Not only did they enjoy more positive outcomes in health, education, and economic undertakings than those who were less hopeful on average, but that moving from less hopeful to more hopeful was correlated with improved attainment in these dimensions.
Moving from hopeless to hopeful correlated to better life outcomes credit – Mahdi Dastmard
Moving, for example, from totally hopeless to totally hopeful resulted in a 4% higher probability of achieving a bachelor’s degree in the next 2 years and a 2% lower probability of being unemployed in future years.
In the health realm, higher levels of hope were linked to a lower probability of being obese in the next 2 years, to reductions in smoking levels, and even to a lower likelihood of having a serious illness or injury. Hopeful people were more likely to have more friends, and less likely to be both lonely and being incarcerated in future years.
One caveat with the data follows the tendency typified by the famous “healthy user bias” in nutrition and fitness literature, where data can appear more impactful than it may actually be because of the way that people who are likely to make a choice regarding their health (for example, choosing to exercise thrice a week) are more likely to make further choices in regards to their health than those who avoid making any such choices.
Essentially, there was a 1.5% greater chance that previous survey respondents would undergo follow-up surveys if they were more hopeful, skewing the data slightly towards the hopeful over the hopeless.
The authors claim it’s the first large-scale analysis showing the links between hope and a range of long-term life outcomes.“We believe that better understanding the drivers of hope and its consequences can ultimately inform the ability of both individuals and of public policy to improve people’s lives,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. Hope Is the Most Impactful Emotion in Determining Long-Term Economic, Social Outcomes
