It was around the time of the Florida election recounts that Lisa Bolton , a marketing professor at Wharton, noticed that no one seemed to be listening. She saw the emotional debate, Democrats and Republicans exercised and red-faced, no one budging an inch. It was more of the same when the new administration announced plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a short time later – environmentalists in one camp, Republicans in another. “I was watching it all and thinking, ‘No one is changing their mind in all of this. There’s no meeting in the middle.’” Her marketing colleague Americus Reed , meanwhile, would often drift into her office, waxing philosophic about the power of identity – the fact that decisions, consumer and otherwise, are really all about a person’s identity. Bolton began thinking about Reed’s words and the national political debate, and a host of other contexts came to mind: Why do so many smokers keep smoking, despite decades of health warnings?…