Why Hope is Fundamental to Achieving Goals and Combatting Cynicism

Cynicism is all around us; it’s contagious, and it can permeate an entire generation’s thinking quickly. Young people today are faced with mental health, physical health, social, democracy and climate crises in the classroom. And when crisis is all around us, it can be easy to fall into patterns of cynicism.

According to Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, Gen Z is the most cynical generation and this is learned behavior. An uptick in cynicism has also led to a glamorization of a cynical mindset or the illusion of the “cynical genius,” said Zaki at the  Learning & the Brain conference earlier this year. Cynicism isn’t isolated to our attitudes; it can lead to chronic stress, earlier mortality, social division and extremism, and broken social relationships, Zaki added.

But there’s hope – or at least, the science of hope, a measurable ability to set goals, push forward and track your own path to completion of those goals, according to Crystal Bryce, an associate professor and assistant dean at The University of Texas at Tyler, who also presented at this year’s conference.

It wasn’t until Bryce was in the early stages of her career that she realized that hope could be measured. Previously, Bryce had done research focused on how to promote hope by studying the benefits of having a caring teacher, positive peer interactions and student motivation. But as it turns out, hope is tangible, “and it is something that we can teach,” Bryce told me.

This isn’t the type of hope that we use to define blanket optimism in our everyday life; this type of hope is a cognitive skill, Bryce continued, and it “helps us reach our goals by helping us identify how we get there.”

Using Snyder’s Adult Hope Scale, Bryce and her team were able to measure pathway thinking, which helps people get from a to b, and agency thinking, which demonstrates a person’s belief in their ability to reach their goals. Bryce’s team found that increased hope outcomes were related to greater academic achievement, reduced stress and anxiety; and for college students, increased hope was related to higher retention rates from their first to their second year of college.

Then, her team applied WOOP — wish, outcome, obstacle, plan — which creates a framework for hope in the classroom. Developed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, the WOOP method allows educators to guide students throughout an effective goal-setting process. The wish and outcome steps of WOOP are self explanatory; a basic scaffold for a project, lesson, or the school year can be created by having students state their goal and desired outcome.

According to Bryce, the obstacle and planning steps of the WOOP method are the most important. Identifying potential obstacles during goal setting allows students to think about the future and build extra scaffolding to help them reach their goals and desired outcomes. And planning practice helps to build students’ self-confidence — increasing their hopefulness, and strengthening their ability to pivot when faced with barriers.

Extending Hope Into Later Years

Hope isn’t just a scientific practice; it can also come organically. Young children are really good at having hope, said Bryce. Take a 4-year-old attempting and failing to climb to the top of a structure at the playground. They might fall, but they believe in their ability to reach their goal and will naturally get up to try again, and maybe even try again in a different way. As kids get older, Bryce continued, they start to doubt themselves and their ability to reach their goals. Bryce suggested that this could be due to growing cynicism in early adolescence, or a dwindling support system.

Bryce and fellow researchers have found that there is a marked decline in hope for adolescents in eighth grade. And this finding was consistent across countries. While there is no definitive answer for why the decline exists for this particular age group, Bryce postulated that the decrease could be related to a combination of puberty, developmental changes, and the generally difficult transitional period between seventh and ninth grades.

Ultimately, having a peer or older adult as a sounding board can help combat cynicism and keep you looking forward to the future, said Bryce. That sounding board isn’t necessarily there to commiserate or ruminate. “They’re going to say, ‘yeah let’s keep going; what is the next step?’” according to Bryce.