How Do We Hope? The Neuro-Cognitive Foundation of Hoping and Believing

In a neurocognitive account, we introduce hope as the result of a process we describe as hoping. It consists of three components: the desire for a valuable good, the belief that it can be realized, and the trust in personal and social resources to make it a reality. We describe how hope shares neurocognitive processes with believing, such as unconscious emotional valuation, probabilistic prediction, attitudes and intentions to act, personal perspective-taking, and expressing oneself through verbal propositions. In addition, hope accommodates the experience of trust, the affective judgments of good, and the attitude of confidence. As people are embedded in a socio-cultural environment, individual hope can turn into collective hope and a sense of collective agency, which, in conjunction with moral, political, and cultural values, can support communities in flourishing. We discuss that our processual account is consistent with traditional theories of hope.