Hope: The Psychology of Believing Things Can Change

You’re sitting with a therapist describing a problem that’s been grinding at you for years, and at some point you say something like “I just don’t see how things could be different.” The therapist doesn’t immediately argue with you. They ask when you last believed things could change, what that felt like, what had been different about those periods.

That question is doing real work. Because what the therapist is probing for isn’t optimism exactly, not a general sense that things tend to work out. They’re probing for something more specific: whether you can see a path forward, and whether you believe you’re capable of walking it.

That’s hope, as psychologists have defined and studied it. And it’s considerably more actionable than most people realize.

Snyder’s Hope Theory

C.R. Snyder, a psychologist at the University of Kansas, developed hope theory in the early 1990s as an alternative to both the folk concept of hope (vague, passive, feelings-based) and the optimism research that was dominating positive psychology at the time.

Snyder defined hope as a cognitive set involving three components: goals, pathways, and agency thinking.

Goals are simply what you’re trying to accomplish. Hope requires having something to move toward, which sounds obvious but isn’t trivial. Some people in significant distress have difficulty articulating goals because the depressive pull toward the future makes specific intentions feel unreachable before they’re even named.

Pathways thinking is the belief that you can identify routes to your goals. When you’re hopeful, you can generate not just one route but often several, which means that when an obstacle blocks one path, you can redirect rather than collapse. Low pathways thinking says: “I don’t see how to get there.” High pathways thinking says: “There might be more than one way to get there, and I can find it or figure it out.”

Agency thinking is the belief that you can use those pathways: that you have the motivation and capability to initiate and sustain the journey toward the goal. This is different from pathways thinking. You might be able to see a route but doubt your capacity to actually take it. High agency thinking says: “I can do this. I’ve done hard things before.”

These three components are interdependent, which is what makes hope more than just wishful thinking. Without a goal, there’s nothing to aim pathways or agency at. Without pathways, agency has nowhere to direct itself. Without agency, even clear pathways don’t get walked. Hope, in Snyder’s model, is the whole system working together.

How Hope Differs from Optimism

Optimism in psychological research refers to two distinct constructs. Martin Seligman’s explanatory style model defines optimism as how you explain causes of events: optimists explain failures as temporary, specific, and external; pessimists as permanent, pervasive, and personal. A separate model developed by Scheier and Carver defines dispositional optimism as a generalized expectancy that good outcomes will occur — measured by the Life Orientation Test rather than explanatory style. Both differ from Snyder’s hope theory.

Hope theory is more specifically about future-directed cognition. Where optimism asks “how do I understand what went wrong?” hope asks “can I see a way forward, and do I believe I can take it?” The two constructs are related but distinct, and they predict slightly different outcomes.

Hope has been found to be a better predictor of academic and athletic performance than optimism in some studies, possibly because it’s more specifically action-oriented. Optimism can remain somewhat passive, a general expectation that things will improve. Hope involves the active generation of pathways and the attribution of agency to oneself.

There’s also a difference in what happens when things go wrong. High-hope people don’t have fewer obstacles; research suggests they actually set more challenging goals, which means they encounter obstacles more frequently. What differentiates them is their response: they’re more likely to try alternative routes, seek support, or reframe the obstacle as part of the process rather than evidence that the goal was never achievable.

What Research Shows About Hope and Mental Health

Snyder and colleagues developed the Adult Hope Scale, a brief self-report measure, and used it in hundreds of studies examining hope’s relationships to various outcomes. The findings are consistent across populations and contexts.

Higher hope is associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety. This relationship holds even after controlling for optimism and self-efficacy, suggesting hope contributes something unique. In longitudinal studies, hope at one time point predicts mental health outcomes at later time points, and the relationship works in both directions: depression reduces hope, and hope protects against depression.

Hope is associated with better physical health outcomes, including in the context of chronic illness and recovery from injury. It predicts greater adherence to treatment protocols, which makes mechanistic sense: if you believe a pathway exists and that you can follow it, you’re more likely to actually take the medications, do the exercises, follow the dietary changes.

The relationship to academic performance has been documented extensively. Hope predicts academic achievement over and above what you’d expect from intelligence alone. Students who score high on hope measures tend to set more specific goals, generate more study strategies, and respond more adaptively to failure.

One particularly interesting area of research concerns hope under adversity. People with high hope don’t avoid difficult emotions or maintain unrealistic beliefs about their circumstances. What distinguishes them is primarily the cognitive structures, specifically the ability to generate pathways and maintain agency belief even when circumstances are hard.

Hope as a Skill, Not Just a Feeling

The most practically important aspect of Snyder’s framework is its implication that hope is trainable. Because it’s defined as a set of cognitive skills rather than a personality trait or a feeling, it’s something you can get better at.

Hope interventions have been developed and tested, primarily for adolescents and college students, and show meaningful effects on hope scores, academic outcomes, and mental health measures. These interventions typically work by helping participants clarify concrete goals, identify and practice generating multiple pathways, and develop stronger agency narratives by reviewing evidence of their own past effectiveness.

Goal clarification is often the first practical step. Vague goals, “I want to feel better,” “I want my life to be different,” don’t support pathways thinking because they don’t specify what you’re moving toward. More specific goals, “I want to be able to have difficult conversations without shutting down,” “I want to find work that uses my skills,” give you something concrete enough to generate pathways around.

Pathways practice involves intentionally generating multiple routes toward a goal, not committing to the first one that appears. This can be done through deliberate brainstorming, conversations with others, or reviewing how you’ve navigated similar situations before. The habit of generating multiple pathways pays dividends when any single pathway gets blocked, because you’ve already done some of the cognitive work of finding alternatives.

Agency thinking can be developed through a particular kind of attention to your own history. High-hope people maintain a richer catalog of their own past effectiveness. When the inner voice says “you can’t do this,” high-hope thinking has counterexamples ready: you’ve done hard things. You’ve found paths when they weren’t obvious. You’ve persisted. The compilation of that evidence isn’t arrogance; it’s an accurate accounting that serves as fuel.

Hope in the Context of Mental Illness

One of the most clinically significant implications of hope theory concerns its application to people who have been told, or who believe, that their condition is permanent and unalterable. Depression often attacks hope directly: the hopelessness that accompanies serious depression is not just a feeling but a set of cognitive distortions that shut down pathways and agency thinking entirely.

Working with hope in the context of depression or other significant mental health conditions involves something delicate: not dismissing the realistic difficulties, but also not accepting hopelessness as an accurate representation of what’s possible. Small goal-setting, attention to even minor evidence of effectiveness, and the scaffolding of pathways thinking by a skilled therapist can begin to rebuild hope when the person can’t yet access it independently.

The research suggests that even modest increases in hope have measurable effects. You don’t need to become a relentlessly optimistic person. You need to be able to see that at least one path exists and that you might be capable of walking at least part of it. That’s often enough to begin.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please reach out to a qualified mental health provider or call 988.