 Psychologists and psychoanalysts have systematically investigated hope since the 1950s (Frank 1968, for an overview, see Gallagher et al. 2020). In many of these first studies, hope was seen as a cognitive process of directing agency that rests on the perception of an outcome as important for an agent to achieve and as having a certain probability (Stotland 1969). While this understanding of hope deviates from the standard philosophical account (see section 3) by requiring a minimal probability, it continues to play a major role in the current psychological literature.