Goal-setting is a valuable tool to convert motivation into action (Locke & Latham, 1990). However, many instances of goal-setting suffer from a lack of meaning and/or lack of an actionable structure. When goal-setting is not driven by a person’s values, intrinsic motivation eventually will be low. And when goal-setting is too general and unspecified, people might not be aware, which concrete steps they need to take to eventually attain their goal and have no good way of assessing progress towards goal attainment, which could defer starting points and hamper motivation.

In this project, we are combining the setting of value-based goals with generating sub-goals down to a level of actionable low-level goals. This way, people have the benefit of intrinsic motivation to attain the goals that are most important to them and simultaneously generate detailed structures of their goals and sub-goals. Thus, even small efforts can lead to the feeling of progress towards goal attainment. We are currently investigating a method of value-driven hierarchical goal-setting in a natural-language chatbot environment that guides people through the process of goal setting with minimal mental effort.

If you are interested in participating in one of our goal-setting experiments, feel free to sign up for our mailing list:

• Goal-Setting: goal-setting-on@tuebingen.mpg.de