’What Do You Want in Life and How Can You Get There?’ An Evaluation of a Hierarchical Goal-Setting Chatbot
The translation of abstract, long-term goals, such as “make a contribution to the field of motivation science,” into short-term, actionable intentions is inherently difficult. Hierarchical goal-setting, a goal-setting strategy in which people construct a hierarchy of increasingly more concrete and proximal subgoals is a promising way to support this process. We designed a goal-setting chatbot that helps people craft action hierarchies for achieving their life goals. We conducted a large online field experiment with two follow-up surveys at one week and one month after the intervention to evaluate the effects of a brief hierarchical planning session with our chatbot on goal pursuit. Although there were no main effects of hierarchical planning on goal-related outcomes, exploratory analyses indicated that hierarchical goal-setting enabled people to make more progress towards goals that appeared less actionable. This suggests that supporting hierarchical goal-setting with chatbots is a promising approach to helping people who don’t know how to pursue their goals.
| Author(s): | González Cruz, Hernán and Mike Prentice and Falk Lieder |
| Book Title: | 13th Annual meeting of the Society for the Science of Motivation |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Month: | May |
| Publisher: | Society for the Science of Motivation |
| Project(s): | |
| BibTeX Type: | Conference Paper (conference) |
| Address: | Virtual Congress |
| State: | Published |
| Electronic Archiving: | grant_archive |
| How Published: | Abstract of presentation at the 13th SSM Virtual Congress |
BibTeX
@conference{GonzalezCruz2021SSMA-Chatbot,
title = {'What Do You Want in Life and How Can You Get There?' An Evaluation of a Hierarchical Goal-Setting Chatbot},
booktitle = {13th Annual meeting of the Society for the Science of Motivation},
abstract = {The translation of abstract, long-term goals, such as “make a contribution to the field of motivation science,” into short-term, actionable intentions is inherently difficult. Hierarchical goal-setting, a goal-setting strategy in which people construct a hierarchy of increasingly more concrete and proximal subgoals is a promising way to support this process. We designed a goal-setting chatbot that helps people craft action hierarchies for achieving their life goals. We conducted a large online field experiment with two follow-up surveys at one week and one month after the intervention to evaluate the effects of a brief hierarchical planning session with our chatbot on goal pursuit. Although there were no main effects of hierarchical planning on goal-related outcomes, exploratory analyses indicated that hierarchical goal-setting enabled people to make more progress towards goals that appeared less actionable. This suggests that supporting hierarchical goal-setting with chatbots is a promising approach to helping people who don’t know how to pursue their goals.},
howpublished = {Abstract of presentation at the 13th SSM Virtual Congress},
publisher = {Society for the Science of Motivation},
address = {Virtual Congress},
month = may,
year = {2021},
author = {González Cruz, Hernán and Prentice, Mike and Lieder, Falk},
month_numeric = {5}
}