Even if politicians seem impossibly divided, many everyday Americans want less division. They want to better understand the other side, especially their friends and family members they disagree with.
We posed this question: What would make you respect them? The majority (56%) of people said they would respect a political opponent's conversation who grounded their views in facts.
Unfortunately, our studies show that people's confidence in facts bridging divides is misguided. Facts do not provide common ground because the facts of the other side do not seem like facts—they seem fake.
Society convinces us that the way to create respect is by throwing facts at your opponent until they submit to your overwhelming rationality, as if their political convictions could be bludgeoned away by statistics.
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