Goal Setting and Anchoring Effects on Meditation Using a Digital Platform: Large-Scale Digital Field Study

Meditation has grown in popularity in recent years, but many people who try meditation often fail to establish a habit. Goal setting has been demonstrated to be an effective technique in behavior change in other health-related contexts but is understudied in the meditation context.

This study had 2 objectives: (1) to assess the association between goal setting and the number of days people meditated and (2) to evaluate whether anchoring bias in the goal-setting question (via response option order) influences goal selection and subsequent meditation behavior.

This large-scale quasi-experimental field study included 18,559 Spotify mobile users aged 18 years or older residing in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or the United States who had listened to at least 5 minutes of meditation content from a specified teacher. The in-app experiment consisted of 2 goal-setting test conditions and an active control. In the test conditions, participants selected the number of days they intended to listen to content from the meditation teacher in the next 7 days. The conditions differed only in the order of goal response options (higher goals listed first vs last). The active control rated how much they liked the teacher but did not set a goal. Because responding was optional, selection bias is possible, and the design is quasi-experimental.

The act of setting any goal had a modest positive association with the number of days people meditated in both treatment condition 1 (β=.08, 95% CI 0.01-0.16) and treatment condition 2 (β=.08, 95% CI 0.002-0.15). People who committed to higher goals were also more likely to meditate more than those who committed to lower goals. Additionally, the distribution of goals between the treatment conditions varied (χ22=84.24; P<.001), and the differences in these distributions subsequently yielded differences in the number of days each group meditated, on average (t2744.1=-2.34; P=.02; Cohen d=-0.09). Ultimately, placing the highest goal as the first answer choice yielded higher average active days among those who chose a goal, but many more people opted out of answering the question itself.

Simply offering an optional in-app goal-setting prompt, the intention-to-treat estimate from the experiment, did not change meditation engagement at the population level. However, among users who chose to respond and set a goal, goal selection was associated with a modest increase in active days. Response option order (anchoring) shifted both goal selection and opt-out rates. These findings highlight an uptake-engagement trade-off that is relevant for digital behavior change design.