Not All Nudges Land: Behavioral Controllability and Elaboration Quality in AI-Supported Journaling

Abstract

AI journaling tools can tailor prompts to a person's own sensed behavior, but it is unclear which behaviors respond to them. We analyzed 369 journal entries from an eight-week passive sensing study. An LLM labeled each entry as expressing an intention to change a behavior or not, and we measured follow-through against 26 sensor features with a 3-day before/after comparison. Responsiveness depended most on whether a behavior involves other people. Behaviors that depend on others improved in only 15 to 22% of cases, while behaviors a person can act on alone improved more often, up to 50 to 63%, though unevenly. How users wrote mattered less. No single text feature separated improved from unimproved entries; writing carried signal only within specific behaviors, most clearly for text messaging and for longer, more personal intention entries. The sample is small, so we treat these as exploratory patterns that point to where AI journaling nudges are most likely to work.