Personal Development How and why hope is better than optimism I read the news everyday. In turn, I'm as scared as you. So, I track how people use words like 'hope', and 'optimism'. "People tend to use hope and optimism as synonyms, but that isn’t accurate. In one 2004 paper in the JoArticel: urnal of Social and Clinical Psychology, two psychologists used survey data to parse the two concepts. They determined that “hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general.” In other words, optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way." Article: The Difference Between Hope and Optimism