The present study investigated whether levels of construal affect retrieval-induced forgetting. The research on construal level theory suggests that higher-level construal (e.g. thinking “why”) promotes relational encoding, whereas lower-level construal (e.g. thinking “how”) encourages item-specific encoding. Based on previous evidence showing relational encoding reduce or even eliminate retrieval-induced forgetting, we hypothesized that the high-level construal condition, which participants were asked to consider why they engage in certain activity, elicits retrieval-induced forgetting, but the low-level construal, which participants were asked to consider how they engage in certain activity, would not. We conducted two experiments and reported the integrated results across two experiments using meta-analysis. The results of meta-analysis showed that retrieval-induced forgetting occurred in the low-level construal condition, whereas the high-level construal did not. Accordingly, these results support our hypothesis, and thus thinking “why” can eliminate retrieval-induced forgetting even if this thought is not related to learning itself.