Is there such a thing as false hope?
Recently, a friend suggested that the Peanuts comic strip hero, Charlie Brown, had a high level of false hope because Lucy kept pulling the football away at the last minute.
I disagreed. I suggested Charlie Brown didn’t have false hope, he was simply overly optimistic because he put his success in Lucy’s hands when he should have sought a new pathway around the barrier (i.e., Lucy). Of course, Charlie Brown may also be a low-hope person because he didn’t understand how to achieve his goals.
Dr. Rick Snyder tackled the question of false hope 20 years ago. At the time, some researchers were suggesting that promoting the need for higher hope could lead to the promotion of false hope.
For the nay-sayers, false hope occurs when goal strategies are built on illusions instead of reality or when inappropriate or impossible goals are pursued or when people try to pursue too many goals and end up not accomplishing any of them.
Here’s what Dr. Snyder’s research found in response to the false hope ideas:
1. Denial or repression of potentially threatening events is a distortion of reality. High hope people choose to find positivity during challenging events even when the odds of success are overwhelmingly negative. What they don’t do is distort or deny reality. (People with diagnosed mental health issues involving delusions almost always have low-hope behaviors).
2. Higher hope people regularly set lofty or “impossible” goals as a challenge to themselves which can lead to increased performance. Higher hope is what often sustains people during difficult goal pursuits; it’s what motivates them. High hope people break down the “impossible” goal into subgoals (i.e., they eat the elephant one bite at a time).
3. Low-hope people limit their energy and goal pursuits. High hope people “diversify” their success through maintaining and pursuing different goals. High hope people choose appropriate and useful pathways to reach their goals. When pathways are blocked, high-hope people utilize adaptive coping strategies to deal with the stress to reach their goals.
Is it possible to have maladaptive goals? Yes. Gang members and sellers of illegal drugs have anti-social goals. Hope Theory is value-neutral. What we should be doing as a society is increasing the well-being of people so that anti-social goals are no longer valued or valuable. Unfortunately, that is a tall order.
What is not a tall order is nurturing an individual’s hope! It’s a process, but one that is easy and accessible to anyone who wants to learn.
If you would like to learn more about how to use hope to nurture hope and protect against job demands, burnout, and stress, please contact me at chris@mrchrisfreeze.com.
If you found this post on hope helpful, please share it with your network!
(Adapted from: Snyder, C. R., Rand, K. L., King, E. A., Feldman, D. B., & Woodward, J. T. (2002). “False” hope. Journal of clinical psychology, 58(9), 1003-1022.)
Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash.
Comments (0)