’What Do You Want in Life and How Can You Get There?’ An Evaluation of a Hierarchical Goal-Setting Chatbot

2021

Conference Paper

re

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.

@conference{GonzalezCruz2021SSMA-Chatbot,
  title = {'What Do You Want in Life and How Can You Get There?'  An Evaluation of a Hierarchical Goal-Setting Chatbot},
  author = {González Cruz, Hernán and Prentice, Mike and Lieder, Falk},
  booktitle = {13th Annual meeting of the Society for the Science of Motivation},
  howpublished = {Abstract of presentation at the 13th SSM Virtual Congress},
  publisher = {Society for the Science of Motivation},
  address = {Virtual Congress},
  month = may,
  year = {2021},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {5}
}