Intervention Reflecting Motivation to Achieve Long-term Goals

Abstract

This study proposes a method to identify interventions appropriate to each motivation to achieve goals. People must stay motivated to engage themselves in working hard over a long time toward goals. Some kinds of intervention work well, while others fail. This method requests them to express their reflections on the engagement in daily behavior toward the goals. It converts the expression into a vector representing their motivational state using the word embedding technology. The method sends messages that reflect the motivational states to examine changes in the motivation when people receive messages. It identifies what types of messages encourage/discourage people with different motivations. In a 6-week experiment with 14 undergraduate and graduate students, intervention with messages is sent to their smartphones. The experiment results reveal messages improving/degrading motivation depending on the current motivational states of subjects, which enable us to provide more effective interventions for users trying to achieve a big goal in a long time.