Hope: A Cognitive Model for Hope
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Think about when you feel hopeful and when you don't. What distinguishes the two?
I hadn’t given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of Professor Charles R. Snyder’s cognitive model for hope, which shed new light on it for me.
What is Hope?
C.R. Snyder proposed a model of hope where an individual may be hopeful if they have:
- Goals they desire
If you don’t or can’t picture any future state you’d like, then you won’t have a lot of hope. - Pathways
You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal. - Willpower or agency
You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.
If you’re missing any of these, you’ll find that hope will be in short supply.
GK Chesterton, never one to miss a witty line, gave quite a different take:
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
— GK Chesterton
Chesterton's tongue-in-cheek hope is fun, but without goals, pathways or willpower, it's not really hope as Snyder would see it.
This sketch features in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures
I first heard about Snyder's model of hope in Brené Brown's Dare to Lead , but is from The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here , by C.R. Snyder.
Related Ideas to Hope Theory
Also see:
- Pillars of Hope
- Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose
- Flow
- Languishing
- Joy: the most vulnerable emotion
- Optimism Bias
- Discovering Truth and Beauty and Sharing it with Others
- Vorfreude: "before happiness"
- 5 Ways to Wellbeing
- How to Instantly Feel Better
The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible-looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others, for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower), and yet they remarkably did.
