Differentiating the Psychological Impact of Threats to Hope and Hopefulness

Recent work identifies hope as an under-explored though potentially important emotion and suggests that hope can be differentiated from an often confused construct-hopefulness. A field experiment involving 272 real world consumers investigated the effects of both hope and hopefulness on consumers' decisions and actions related to retirement investing. The results show that hope and hopefulness are two distinct emotions and have very different effects on consumers' information search, risk perceptions, and choice outcomes in retirement investment decisions, with hopefulness impacting the likelihood that consumers would invest in a 401k retirement plan and hope impacting the extent of their information search and risky decision making