WISE INTERVENTIONS

We recruited college  students who had recently attained an academic goal, and asked them to  describe their goal attainment experience as well as the behaviors they had  engaged in to complete this goal. We then randomly assigned them to either a  journey metaphor, a destination metaphor, or a no-metaphor control condition  to construe their goal attainment experience either as a completed journey,  as having reached a destination, or without any metaphor (in a literal  manner). Students reported their desire (or lack of desire) to continue these  goal-aligned behaviors. Two weeks later, we sent a follow-up survey so they  could report how much effort they had indeed put into these goal-aligned  behaviors over the 2-week period. We found that construing an achieved  academic goal as a completed journey (vs. a destination or a no-metaphor  control) increased college students' self-reported likelihood of continuing  goal-aligned behaviors, both in their immediate intent to continue and in  their reported behaviors two weeks later.