If you listen to the news or to political pundits, you've probably heard that Americans are more politically polarized than ever before.

We've sorted ourselves into opposing red and blue camps and we can't seem to see eye to eye on anything.

With Election Day around the corner, many of us are feeling the strain of those divisions.

When you're

getting into an angry debate with a childhood friend on Facebook or biting your tongue in a family

dinner to keep the peace, the political divide can feel unbridgeable. Amid that strain, psychologists'

research can offer some insight. It can help us understand where our political identities come from,

why we think about politics the way we do, and why it's so hard to talk across the political

divide. So what is the psychology that underlies how most people think about politics? How did

American history and our own places in it lead each of us where we are. Is the political divide

today really worse than it was years ago? Does social media cause political polarization or

does it just reflect it? And what can we do to bridge the divide and maintain connections with

those we disagree with? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association

that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Keith Payne, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Payne is a social psychologist who studies inequality and political polarization.

His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Atlantic and on NPR.

He's author of the 2017 book, The Broken Ladder, How Inequality

Effects the Way We Live, Think and Die.

His new book coming out in October is called Good Reasonable People,

The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide.

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