Martijn van Zomeren doesn’t hate hope. But he certainly thinks hope is overrated. Recent research found that when people were more hopeful about solving climate change, they were not more motivated to do anything about it. Hoping may thus make us feel better, while doom is coming to the world.
In many ways, psychology suffers from an overdose of individualism. This is problematic because this dominant view conceptualizes social relationships as external to the isolated individual. In his new book, Martijn van Zomeren develops an essentially relational theory of motivation, which assumes that, in essence, we are moved and motivated by others.