Obama’s Change Consultants

Last year there was an article in Time about how the Obama administration was consulting experts in the science of influence to devise campaign strategies. The work of Robert Cialdini was mentioned, and I’ve since read his book Influence and thought it was excellent.

Additionally, the article said

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

I’ve got the rest of those on my reading list.