Don’t Get Your Hopes Up: The Influence Of Advice To Decrease Expectations On Disappointment Following A Negative Outcome

The phrase “don’t get your hopes up” is often given to a person by their friend or advisor in an attempt to lower their expectations to help mitigate any disappointment the person may feel if the outcome is not ideal. Research has found that people with overly high expectations tend to experience a great deal of disappointment following an undesirable outcome (Larsen et al., 2003, Sweeny & Andrews, 2017, Sweeny & Shepperd, 2010). Other research has found that our expectations are not static and often decrease to serve the purpose of reducing disappointment that may occur (van Dijk et al., 2003, Shepperd et al., 1996, Sweeny & Shepperd, 2007). The previous research warrants the assumption that this advice to not get your hopes up could potentially function as an effective way to minimize disappointment. The current study aimed to investigate this idea through the manipulation of advice to participants to not get their hopes up before experiencing an undesirable outcome. We predicted that participants who received the advice to lower their expectations would report lower disappointment following the undesirable outcome of not winning a gift card than participants who did not receive the advice. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that participants who received advice to not get their hopes up and participants who did not receive the advice reported similar measures of disappointment. The results suggest that advice to not get your hopes up might not be effective at reducing disappointment. That being said, there is a lot of room for improvement in future studies that could eliminate some limitations to create a clearer picture of the impact of this advice.