It’s estimated that more than 500 nonprofits aim to heal a fractured America, many of them troubled by the blood sport that seems to accompany most political disagreements.

Todd Rose has a message for these groups and their philanthropic backers: America’s divides are not as bad as you think. You may be wasting your money. And your solutions may only make things worse.

Philanthropy is, ironically, funding this message. Rose, a high-school dropout turned Harvard-trained neuroscientist, is co-founder of Populace, a nonpartisan think tank that enjoys cross-ideological backing from the likes of liberal tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg and conservative industrial magnate Charles Koch.

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Populace has analyzed Americans’ values, aspirations, and political views. Its surveys on a range of topics — K-12 and higher education, the modern work force, the American dream — have found that we share more in common than you might expect. More important, Americans mistakenly believe their views are the minority, that the country as a whole embraces values and priorities far different from their own.

The result? What Rose describes as a “collective illusion,” a faulty sense that the country is more divided than it is, that everyone on the other side of the political fence holds really extreme views.

Rose is not the only researcher pointing to consensus hiding in plain sight. After the 2020 election, pollster George Barna of the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University described a “supermajority” — two-thirds of both the Republican and Democratic parties — that supports policies that aim to increase the manufacturing work force, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and make Social Security and Medicare financially solvent, among other things.

More in Common, an international group studying division, found that Americans consistently see their political opposites as more extreme than they really are. “We misunderstand each other,” says co-founder Tim Dixon. “Even those who hold quite clear views are not as extreme as what the other side thinks.”

Read the full article about America’s divides by Drew Lindsay at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.