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There is a separateness that currently defines contemporary America. Republicans and Democrats have spun off centrifugally from the common center they once shared, and we have become a polarized country.

The Pew Research Center reports that Republicans and Democrats are more ideologically divided today, with greater partisan antipathy, than at any point in the last two decades.

What can we do to change this situation?

That is the question psychology professor Rob Willer has been asking. He is director of the Polarization and Social Change lab at Stanford University. He and his team have been looking at the various attempts that different groups, companies and individuals have been making to answer the question.

Professor Willer points out that polarized people rarely have any contact with people who have different views from their own. They often hold wildly exaggerated, inaccurate views of the other side. “Members of the two political parties frequently believe that people in the opposite party support political violence 300 to 400 percent more than they actually do,” Willer finds.

Is there any strategy that we, as individuals, might follow in our daily lives, to remedy the divide?

To engage with someone who holds very different beliefs than you do, I propose a strategy that I call “empathetic, curious listening.” (It is a technique I have drawn on frequently in my 20 years as a professional mediator.)

William Ury, co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, in a study of conversation types, identified three basic categories of conversations: the “What Happened” conversation, the Feelings Conversation, and the Identity Conversation.

When you engage with someone who holds radically different beliefs from yours, you are inviting them into an Identity Conversation, where you will be the “empathetic, curious listener.” It holds the promise of unifying people.

You are asking them to share with you an important part of their identity.

The key to the success of such a conversation is to be truly interested in what they have to share and to manifest it in your body language and attitude. Be interested in them! Show them that you really want to hear what they have to say. In short, truly be an empathic, curious listener!

There is vulnerability to being an empathetic, curious listener, and there is vulnerability for the other person as they share. But the chasm in our country is so palpable and dramatic, the only way we can cross it is to be intentional and make the leap.

Happy landing!