the receipts · 1 of 7
between the lines
Deciding when and where you'll go makes it much more likely you actually go.
Why it's in the game
Most people who mean to go to a public meeting don't. They didn't change their minds. The evening arrived and nothing tied the intention to it.
The best-tested fix is plain: decide in advance when you'll go, where you'll be coming from, and what you'll be doing right before. That's the plan at the end of this action, and it's where the strongest evidence on this page sits.
Marking the one line that moves money or changes a rule gives the plan a reason to exist. That reading step has much weaker evidence than the plan, and this page says so below.
the study that started it
287,228 phone calls, 2008
In the 2008 presidential election, David Nickerson and Todd Rogers ran a phone experiment with 287,228 people. Some callers just encouraged people to vote. Others asked when they would vote, where they would be coming from, and what they would be doing beforehand. Only the plan-making script moved turnout.
The receipts
Every source was checked against the original on September 25, 2026. Each one links to it.
- +4.1percentage points in turnout
Nickerson & Rogers (2010) Psychological Science 21(2), 194–199
Field experiment · 287,228 people
A script that asked people to plan when and where they'd vote raised turnout among the people reached. A standard encouragement call had no significant effect.
read it at marketing.wharton.upenn.edu ↗ - d = .65average effect across 94 tests
Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 69–119
Meta-analysis · 94 independent tests
If-then plans ("when X happens, I'll do Y") had a medium-to-large effect on actually reaching the goal.
read it at sciencedirect.com ↗ Delli Carpini & Keeter (1996) What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters, Yale University Press
Survey-based book
People who know more about politics take part more.
This is a correlation. It doesn't show that reading an agenda makes anyone more likely to act, and the arrow could run the other way.
read it at goodreads.com ↗
The honest part
The plan study was about voting in a presidential election, not going to a local meeting. The effect showed up only in single-voter households; people in multi-voter households weren't moved by any script.
The d = .65 pools many kinds of goals, and none of the 94 tests was about civic meetings. Nobody has tested whether marking one line on an agenda changes anything.
What you do in the game
- The laptop in the kitchen shows the body's own document. Long ones open full screen, with a search box and the lines the file flagged underlined.
- Tap where the line starts, then where it ends. If none of them fit, say it in your own words.
- Pick in the room or on the stream. You get a countdown to the meeting, the room and street address with a map, or the link to watch live.
- Put it on your calendar and tap I'll go. The ceiling light comes on. After the meeting, the game asks whether you went.
How strong is the evidence?
Controlled, for the when-and-where plan. The reading step rests on observational work.
- Practice
- Case histories and experience. Nobody has measured it with a control group.
- Field
- Real-world data: a natural experiment, a panel, or careful observation. Strong, but not randomized.
- Controlled
- People were randomly assigned to do it or not, and the difference was measured.