The prototypical hope in lay people's eyes.

What is it about?

Hope is ubiquitous in people’s lives. People hope that the weather will be sunny tomorrow, they hope to be admitted to the school of their choice, they hope for recovery, even after a bad prognosis, and now in early 2020, they hope the pandemic corona-virus could vanish ASAP and no more people will die from it. Hope is also ubiquitous in academic literature. Researchers have reported the role of hope as a coping mechanism of terminally-ill patients (e.g., cancer; Herth, 1989), as motivation to reach ones' healthy-eating goal (Winterich & Haws, 2011), as motivation to search for more information (De Mello, MacInnis, & Stewart, 2007), and as motivation to donate (Kappes, Sharma, & Oettingen, 2013). However, although hope is a well-studied topic, there is no consensus on its definition. Moreover, limited research has investigated the role of hope in consumption contexts. This paper defines hope using a prototype analysis that implies laypeople's views of hope (in contrast to the previous definitions of hope that largely rely on researchers' thoughts).

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Why is it important?

There is no consistent definition of hope although it's ubiquitous in people's life and research literature. Previous definitions rely much on a top-down approach and a bottom-up angle is needed. This research adopted a prototype analysis to provide the prototypes of hope definition from lay people's views, compared the consistency and discrepancies of previous definitions and the results of current research, provided a working definition of hope.

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