The Psychology of Hope: Can Belief and Miracles Improve Well-Being?

A group of researchers studying cancer patients had a remarkable finding- not only did the patients with higher levels of hope cope better emotionally, but they also said that they had less pain and enjoyed a better quality of life when they had the same medical outcomes as the lower-hope patients (Snyder et al., 1991). Hope was, however,  not just a feeling for the better; it was also something that had physical substance. It was working- it was performing a real thing in the mind and body. When people suffer,  they look for something else, something they have no control over, like faith, miracles, or that things will get better. 

This is where hope and belief in miracles start to merge. Both are methods used by the mind to strive towards a desired result when few things in the moment are certain. What is the psychological aspect of hope, and what is its difference from believing in miracles? How do individuals withstand the odds when they’re not in their favour? How can certain individuals consider a coincidence to be miraculous and others just chance?  How does a positive future orientation affect our attitude, our bodies and our current functioning? This article explores the science of hope, optimism and miracle thinking and how people cope when the outcome is actually up to chance. 

Read More: Hope: Our Lifeguard During Adversity

Snyder’s Hope Theory 

Hope is a passive feeling, a fuzzy wish for something good to happen. Psychologist Charles R. Snyder had another theory. In the early 1990s, Snyder started to formulate the “Hope Theory” that focused on the Cognitive (mental process involving thought) Theory of Hope, which included two aspects (Snyder, 2002). 

The first is agency thinking, having a sense of belief that one can make progress towards their objectives. It’s this voice in our minds that tells us that we can do this or that. The second is pathway thinking- more than one way to reach their desired goal. Hopeful people are people who believe that the end is attainable, and that they can get there (Snyder, 2002).  This distinction is all-important. They can’t think of how this person hopes to improve, and don’t believe that the person can improve; that’s wishful thinking, not Snyder’s hope. In line with this theory, hope is an active process. It takes the will as well as the way.

Research has shown that people with higher hope scores are consistently more resilient (able to recover and overcome when things go wrong). They can adapt to changing their plans if they don’t work out, since they’ve learned how to think outside the box and find alternative plans. They also tend to experience less persistent and less fatigue-inducing worrying and depression when facing challenges, but not because they deny or ignore the challenges, but because they believe they can do something about the challenge and that they will be able to (Snyder et al., 1991). Hope in this respect does not negate reality. It’s a mindset of thinking that one can do something about it. 

Read More: The Cognitive Psychology of Doubt and Certainty: How Your Brain Shapes Beliefs

Optimism Research 

Optimism and hope are close cousins, but once again, the psychological picture is clearer than the common usage. Also, optimism and pessimism are more about the way people interpret ill events than it is about being generally “sunny,” says Martin Seligman,  one of the founders of positive psychology, the area of psychology that focuses on what makes people flourish. 

A pessimist often attributes failures in three ways: the first is always, the second is everything, and the third is me. An optimist would see the same event as temporary  (“This bad patch will pass”, this is just one area, not everything”) or (“This is a circumstance I can influence/change”). These are not just attitudes, but also real differences in health, achievement, and mental well-being over time (Seligman, 1991). 

In a widely cited study, Seligman and his colleagues researched the insurance industry and discovered that happy salespeople sold more insurance and were much less likely to quit when they were rejected than their not-so-happy counterparts. In one related study of university swimmers, the results showed that optimists swam as well as they had been told they would after they were told bad news, and even slightly better than they were told after they were told good news, whereas pessimists swam worse when told bad news, but not as badly as they were told. Explanations for failure to oneself predict whether or not a person will persevere (Seligman et al, 1988).

Read More: There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t 

The Concept of Learned Optimism and Learned Helplessness 

Explanatory style developed out of a previous and altogether different stream of research, referred to as learned helplessness. Seligman and colleagues discovered that in the late 1960s, animals that had been subjected to repeated negative experiences that they had no way to escape from eventually ceased to try to escape even when they had the opportunity. The animals had apparently learned that what they did did not matter, and that learning was carried over when the situation changed (Seligman, 1991).

The human parallel was impressive. Individuals who have suffered continuous failure and have come to feel powerless to influence these setback situations may fall into a similar pattern: a negative explanatory style in which failure is seen as permanent, pervasive and personal, and success as a lucky coincidence. Such a negative outlook has been associated with increased depression, poor physical health and decreased willingness to persist in a situation that is truly modifiable (Seligman, 1991). 

The good news from this research is that Seligman did not use optimism as a personality characteristic that one is born with. He theorized that this pessimistic voice can be trained to see and challenge it through a structured method he called the  ABCDE model: A (Adversity) Identify the negative event or experience; B (Belief) Identify the automatic negative thought or belief; C (Consequence) Identify the consequence or the impact on the person’s emotions and behavior; D (Dispute) Actively dispute the negative belief with evidence; and E (Energization) Note the energization of self. This can change a person’s normal explanatory style and,  consequently, their resilience and emotional well-being with practice (Seligman, 1991).  That is, hope and optimism are not just a product of luck; they are, at least in part, skills. 

Read More: Despair to Hope: What a person infected with HIV needs?

The Placebo Effect and Belief Systems 

Hope and optimism are enough to impact the way people “cope” with a tough diagnosis;  the placebo effect demonstrates that belief impacts the body itself. A placebo is an inactive treatment, such as a sugar pill or saline injection or a sham procedure, that causes a real physiological or psychological improvement because the individual given it expects it to be effective (Beecher, 1955). This is not the “all in the patient’s head” sense, but brain imaging reveals that the effects of a placebo are the same as those of an opioid drug; they both trigger the same opioid pathways, and they can also be blocked by opioid blocker drugs (Benedetti, 2008). 

The two most likely mechanisms attributable to the effect are expectation and conditioning. The mind is programmed by the suggestion that a treatment will help,  which changes the way the brain functions regarding pain, mood, or fatigue. If someone previously had relief after taking a pill, going through a ritual, or receiving a caregiver’s reassurance, then they may have a less intense form of that relief without taking the actual medication or engaging with the ritual or caregiver (Kirsch,  1985). 

Belief systems and context play a large part in the placebo effect. An effect can vary by pill colour, pill price, confidence of the person giving the pill, and cultural significance of a treatment. This is why faith healing, ritual, and miracle cures may be as beneficial as a placebo pill for those who believe they are being assisted by a stronger, more benevolent force, in so many ways as a placebo does (Benedetti, 2008; Pargament, 1997). None of this is to say the underlying disease has been cured; placebos work much more effectively on subjective symptoms such as pain, nausea, and fatigue than they do on modifying the course of disease, but none of it is to say that belief is without force. 

Read More: Hope: The Hidden Foundation of Happiness

Cognitive Biases Underlying Miracle  

How does someone perceive that a recovery, a coincidence or a near miss is a miracle and not just chance? One part of the answer is that they are just normal, documented cognitive biases, not some special irrationality. Human beings are pattern-seeking animals, and sometimes, this is known as apophenia, which means that they look to see some sense in random or coincidental events (Gilovich, 1991). 

There are several specific biases that exacerbate this effect. Confirmation bias means that people tend to remember and notice the prayer that was answered and forget and ignore all the prayers that were not answered. When the availability heuristic is used, a single vivid, emotionally compelling story of recovery appears to be more representative than it actually is (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). And survivorship bias is that we hear only from the person who swallowed the bullet; the many who didn’t, by definition, aren’t the ones telling the tale afterwards. 

The events that are called miraculous depend on the cultural and social context. A  mixture of anthropological and psychology-of-religion research indicates that miracle attributions are not randomly nor uniformly distributed; they group around events that are already emotionally charged- illness, birth, survival, loss- and are interpreted in the context of the existing religious-cultural frame within which the event occurs (Pargament, 1997). One community might see a recovery as a medical triumph; another as divine providence; and the one person may switch back and forth depending on who they’re talking to. This is not so much a failure of reason as a socially acquired means of making an uncertain, emotional event coherent and meaningful. 

Importantly, this sort of meaning-making is nothing. Therapists can present difficult recovery as meaningful, either as a miracle story or as a hope story, and in doing so, they can facilitate the same active coping process that Snyder and Seligman describe. This approach provides a narrative in which the individual actively responds to adversity rather than remaining a passive victim of chance.

Read More: The Psychology of Hope Effect: How Prayers and Spiritual Rituals Help People Cope 

Use of Hope in Therapy 

As hope is a key predictor of coping and resilience, one might expect that it is not surprising that clinicians have attempted to foster hope intentionally. Snyder’s Hope Therapy provides a structured intervention. It helps clients establish concrete and personally meaningful goals. It also helps them identify multiple pathways to achieve those goals. In addition, it builds self-efficacy by encouraging clients to recall past successes and reframe obstacles as challenges to solve (Lopez et al., 2003).

Hope functions in therapy in a way that is similar to Bandura‘s (1997) research on self-efficacy. When clients believe they are capable of achieving a desired outcome, they put in more effort. They also remain more committed, even when they are not getting better. Therapists who focus specifically on hope often ask clients to imagine a hopeful future in vivid detail. They then encourage clients to work backwards from that future to identify the first step. This process helps train the pathways-thinking component of Snyder’s model.

There have also been adaptations for medical and palliative settings. In these settings, the goal is not always to achieve a cure. Instead, the focus is on helping patients maintain a sense of purpose, dignity, and agency despite serious illness. The findings from cancer patients cited at the beginning of this article support this conclusion. Hope did not change the medical outcome. Instead, it influenced how patients lived the time they had (Snyder et al., 1991). From this point of view, therapists use explanatory style, expectation, and meaning-making purposefully to create hope as a therapeutic tool. Together, these elements help improve functioning in the here and now. This remains valuable regardless of what the future may bring.

Read More: Optimism Bias: Why We Ignore Risks and Overestimate Success

Conclusion 

Hope, optimism, placebo responses, and even miracle beliefs all have one thing in common. The anticipation of a positive change alters the way people feel, act, and sometimes even react. This can happen regardless of whether that change actually occurs. According to Snyder’s Hope Theory, hope is not just an “active” form of wishing,  but it is also “agency” thinking and “pathways” thinking.

As illustrated in Seligman’s research on explanatory style and learned optimism, this future orientation is not simply an individual characteristic. People can learn it to some degree. Placebo studies have demonstrated that the mind’s expectations can influence the body’s functioning. This effect is measurable through physiological pathways. As research on miracle thinking shows, the miraculous is not necessarily irrational. Instead, it is often the result of regular cognitive biases and cultural sense-making.

References + 

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