Hope and Nonconscious Academic Goals: The Role of Evaluative Readiness

Hope, a cognitive–motivational construct defined by agency and pathways thinking, has been consistently linked to goal pursuit and achievement. However, existing studies examine only conscious forms of goal striving. The present experiment investigated whether dispositional hope may also influence “nonconscious” goal pursuit through evaluative readiness—the automatic tendency to evaluate goal-relevant stimuli positively. Eighty-four undergraduates were randomly assigned to complete either a scrambled-sentences task designed to nonconsciously activate an academic goal or a control task, followed by an automatic/implicit attitudes measure. Facilitation scores on this measure (faster responses to positive vs. negative adjectives associated with academic-goal-relevant stimuli) indexed evaluative readiness. Analysis revealed that individuals higher in dispositional hope showed greater evaluative readiness than those lower in hope, F (1,80) = 5.51, p = .02, partial η² = .06. By demonstrating that hopeful individuals automatically favor goal-relevant cues, this study broadens Hope Theory to include nonconscious mechanisms of goal pursuit.