Why You Can Actually Be Hopeful on Election Day

Following Tuesday’s presidential election, roughly half of the country will be disappointed — many bitterly so — with the outcome. Indeed, even many who cast a vote for the winning candidate will have done so reluctantly and with a sense of distinct apprehension about the likely outcome of that decision.

Many Americans are anticipating Election Day with a distinct feeling of dread, so much so that, in an ABC/Ipsos poll published in October, fully 47 percent of respondents reported believing that America’s best days are in the past. While there is much around us that is good, many of our problems and conflicts — personal, relational, political — can appear intractable. In the face of mounting pessimism and even despair, we would be well-advised to reconsider the varieties of optimism and of hope; we might find that, in many areas of our lives, “rational optimism” is in fact perfectly justified. And even where optimism would be fruitless, we can and should always cultivate hope in the face of an uncertain future. 

Regardless of what happens, however, we will need to continue to work together. We will need to continue to have hope. Those on the “winning” side need to reach across the divide and discern how we can work together. Those whose preferred candidate does not triumph, rather than bewailing or even refusing that outcome, can likewise ponder how, or in what ways, we might together seek the common good. Despite the challenges we Americans face, we arguably have many grounds for rational optimism about our present and our future, whether in our economy, which remains not only a tremendous source of wealth but also of remarkable innovation, or our Constitution, which has proven resilient in the face of nearly 250 years of political crises. And your local community is almost certainly full of many signs of a bright future, if you only choose to see them. 

Hope vs. Optimism

The terms “hope” and “optimism” are sometimes used interchangeably. While there are various resemblances between these two states, there are also differences. Optimism tends to concern expectations that the future will be positive, though it needn’t have any future orientation. By contrast, hope always concerns the future, but arguably has no necessary connection with any belief that a positive outcome is more likely than not. Even in such cases, there may still be reasons for action, and reasons to hope.

Thomas Aquinas understood hope as a desire arising from the perception of “a future good [that is] difficult but possible to obtain.” Likewise, Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale argue that hope entails a desire for something good in the future and a belief that this is possible; further, it extends beyond belief and desire to include a reason for action to try to obtain that future good. Even when circumstances are difficult and we cannot necessarily expect a good outcome, there may be reasons to hope for it — and to work for it.

Optimism, by contrast, is usually understood as the belief that some future positive outcome is more likely than not to come about. Psychologists often consider optimism a psychological asset, and there is empirical research to support its beneficial effects on health. Philosophers, however, tend to be more skeptical of optimism, considering it to be an “epistemic deficiency.” After all, if we tend to think a positive outcome is more likely than it is, then we do not have a rational view of the situation; we’re distorting reality. While there is undoubtedly something correct in this philosophical perspective, the picture is arguably somewhat more complicated. There are varieties of optimism, and some of them are, in fact, rational. Such forms of rational optimism was the topic of one of our recent papers at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard.

One intriguing fact about optimism is that, in the West at least, it tends to increase (not decrease) with education. This might seem unusual if optimism were always irrational. While there are undoubtedly cases in which we simply misjudge probabilities — for example, “When 70% of the population take themselves to be less likely to be divorced than the average person, they cannot all be correct” — there are other instances in which our optimism may be grounded in reason. We might be optimistic about a positive outcome because we have the resources to bring about a good outcome — this is “resourced optimism.” So too, we might be optimistic about a good outcome because we are willing to work hard towards it — or “agentive optimism” — a trait which has some conceptual overlap with the “growth mindset” championed by the psychologist Carol Dweck. 

Sometimes optimism might not concern expectations about the future at all but instead be a way of looking at the world. We can, in other words, see the glass as half full, rather than half empty. Such “perspectival optimism” is not a matter of correctly weighing evidence (anything that can be described as half full can be described, with equal justice, as half empty), but a matter of one’s overall outlook on the world, a deliberate decision to foreground the good in a situation rather than the evil. Thus, in addition to the “groundless optimism” rightly criticized by philosophers, there are also these other forms that, at least at times, can be rational. 

This recent paper from the Human Flourishing Program describes the conditions for such optimism to be rational and considers other issues of the scope of optimism, its moral and practical implications, and its relation to hope — a brief summary can be found here.

Empirical Research on Hope and Optimism

Given the challenges we face and the importance of hope and “rational” optimism in confronting our challenges, it makes sense to try to study such dispositions empirically — to learn about their causes and effects. Some of our prior research on hope has indicated important effects of hope on various other aspects of health and well-being, both for adults and for adolescents. A lot of empirical research has been carried out on optimism as well, again indicating effects on health, deriving both from optimism’s association with healthy behaviors (such as better diet and exercise) as well as from its association with reduced levels of stress and its physiological toll. While this is of interest in its own right, the existing research does not adequately distinguish between the grounds of optimism and whether it is rational or irrational. This might also explain why, while the associations between health and optimism are seen in the U.S., they are not seen in Japan. Irrational forms of optimism may perhaps not function as well everywhere. 

To understand these nuances better, so as to promote rational forms of optimism, along with health and well-being globally, we need more nuanced measures, and over the past years we have been working to produce these. We have recently introduced an assessment of optimism that distinguishes the different forms of optimism: groundless, resourced, agentive, and perspectival. We’ve also introduce a new, and arguably conceptually more adequate, measure of hope as well, since the measure most frequently used at present (that of Charles Snyder) does not adequately capture the notion of difficulty that plays such an important role in the philosophical discussions of hope, and in our own daily experience, when we are sometimes not optimistic about the future, but can nevertheless hope and work towards a good outcome. We’ve collected quite a bit of data on these new measures of hope and optimism and are in the process of reporting on their psychometric properties, and we hope that in doing so, these measures might empower new research in this field so that we can promote hope, rational optimism, and human well-being.

Facing the Weeks, Months, and Years Ahead

We need hope, and we need rational  — agentive, resourced, perspectival — optimism to confront the many challenges facing us in the years ahead, challenges cultural, political, environmental, and more. The prospect of achieving any meaningful collective action in our current state of deep polarization — divided as we are by politics, religion, geography, and even gender — might make it seem difficult to have much hope for the future. 

Even where we can’t find grounds for expecting the future to be bright, however, we can face that uncertainty with an attitude of resolute hope that, together, we can promote the common good. After all, as deep as our divisions might be, there is still much that we share, not least a desire for ourselves, our communities, and our country to flourish. While we may understand the precise meaning of flourishing differently, and propose different means to attain it, there is a lot that we nearly all desire for our lives including, as we’ve argued elsewhere: happiness, health, meaning, good, good relationships, and material security. Seeking these things together requires hope. Seeking these things together — and recognizing the good that we have already accomplished together in this country and around the world — requires a perspectival optimism: a seeing the glass half full, rather than half empty. Seeking the good together requires making use of our resources, and our agency, to try to realize our hopes — our individual hopes and our hopes for life together.