Supporters of President Donald Trump have been described by critics as anything from members of a cult to people simply willing to be pushovers for the Republican leader. But a new study built on four separate experiments indicates that, regardless of how people view those they politically disagree with, individuals on both the far left and the far right can in fact be engaged.

"These studies show that perceptions of other people's receptiveness are equally important, if not more," the study's authors wrote in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed social psychology journal, on Monday. The framing matters: rather than treating polarization purely as a clash of fixed positions, the authors locate at least part of the problem in the assumptions people form about their opponents before a conversation ever begins.

The research was conducted in Portugal and Sweden, though the authors noted that its rubrics carry implications for politics around the world. The authors wrote that the studies show that "specifically, they show that people are overly pessimistic about the degree to which other people might be open to different political ideas, and that these misperceptions are associated with negative expectations and intentions regarding talking to other people about political topics (or even other unrelated topics). The upside is that correcting such misperceptions might offer a route for ameliorating polarization and ideological conflict." That distinction gives the findings practical weight: if the barrier is a misjudgment about other people's openness rather than genuine closed-mindedness, the target for change is a belief, not an opponent's actual positions.

Explaining the origins of the research, Karina Petrova of PsyPost wrote on Monday that "a research team, led by psychologist André Mata at the University of Lisbon along with colleagues from Linköping University, investigated the psychological barriers preventing inter-partisan dialogue. They suspected that a primary obstacle is how people perceive the receptiveness of others. If someone believes that a political opponent is completely closed off to new ideas, they will naturally avoid interacting with them. The researchers designed a series of studies to measure these perceptions and test whether changing them could increase people’s willingness to engage in political conversations."

The findings arrive amid broader concerns about the deterioration of bipartisanship in Washington. Read together, the study and that institutional history frame the problem on two levels: the psychological assumptions individuals carry into political conversations, and the structural changes that have reshaped how lawmakers themselves encounter one another. Speaking with AlterNet in August, Clarine Riddle Nardi — Connecticut attorney general from 1989 to 1991, a judge on the Connecticut Superior Court, and former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — described how cross-party cooperation has eroded over a career spanning every level and branch of government.

"I've worked in local government; I've worked in state government; I've worked in the federal government; I've worked in the legislative branch; I've worked in the executive branch; and I've worked in the judicial branch. So I've been able to span all of the branches and all the levels," Nardi said. "And I do think there are a number of things that have happened along the way."

She pointed to one development in particular as a turning point.

"One of them was [Republican former House Speaker Newt] Gingrich, in '92 or '94 — I can't remember which year, but I could pin it down — when he urged everybody not to move to D.C., but to stay in their districts and campaign so they could keep getting elected. I think that was a turning point in people not meeting other people here in DC and getting to know them. Because if they only come in on Monday night and leave on Thursday night, they're doing partisan stuff Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and they're not getting to know their colleagues. They're not getting involved in the community with their family. They're totally focused on partisan types of things." As for what happens next, the evidence so far stops at willingness: the experiments measured whether corrected perceptions made people more open to political conversations, a step short of demonstrating that such corrections ease polarization itself.