Americans, we are often told, are more divided than we’ve ever been before. A new study, however, suggests that we are looking at polarization the wrong way.

Last week, the State Policy Network released a pivotal study that, if heeded, could very well change the way we examine political polarization.

Authors Erin Norman and Lura Forcum make the case that, in looking at politics through a binary, Republican vs. Democrat lens, we are omitting the many things that we have in common. Instead of measuring polarization using political inputs or even policy inputs, Norman and Forcum grouped voters into seven segments, reflecting differing levels of civic engagement, trust, moral values, and so on. By asking voters about things that actually affect their lives, instead of engaging in the tired red vs. blue discourse, the authors found that we are actually much more unified than we originally thought.

“America is a very large nation that, from the very beginning, was made up of lots of separate communities that had their own traditions and their own ways of doing things,” Norman told me. The current framing of politics as a binary choice has undercut our pluralistic nature. “People are much more nuanced,” she said. “They are not really all that engaged in politics in their day-to-day lives, which is easy to forget if you live in the D.C. Beltway or a Twitter bubble.”

When we engage in reductionist thinking, we miss or fail to take into account “the way in which people orient their day-to-day lives, their values, and how they make moral decisions or moral considerations” as well as “how important community is to people, and how involved they are in their community,” she added.

Out of Norman and Forcum’s seven segments — examples include the Scattered Middle Class, the Tribal Left, and the Politically Unbothered — six of the seven segments were remarkably evenly divided in terms of Republican-Democrat balance. The Tribal Left was the only segment that clearly leaned one way politically. Otherwise, Americans, if asked about the things that really matter — like questions about morality, community, and trust in others — are actually a lot alike.

Norman is, moreover, optimistic about a “return to dialogue.” People are, especially since 2016, yearning for social connectedness and communication, even with those with whom they disagree.

“If you dig into this idea of, ‘I’m only going to bond with people in my in-group,’ you’re going to become smaller and smaller and more extreme and more fringe,” she said.

This is undoubtedly true. In fact, in a recent interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times, author Robert Putnam explained the danger of super-cohesion, or an excess of what he refers to as “bonding social capital,” wherein you associate with people who share many of the same interests and values. “Some forms of bonding social capital,” he explains, “are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous.” Putnam also said that, in an ethnically, religiously, and ideologically heterogenous country like America, we could really use more “bridging social capital,” which entails associating with people we normally wouldn’t associate with.

Luckily, Norman and Forcum found that “76 percent of Americans say they respect the opinions of others, even if they do not agree.”

This is an encouraging start.

Now, it is up to us to walk the walk. We must, no matter how hard, break out of our ideological enclaves and talk to people with disparate views. I have, much to my own surprise, done this quite successfully. In fact, I have, over the past year or so, acquired a few Left-wing pen-pals, whom I’ve become quite friendly with.

We can, in fact, come together again.