This post is a review of Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide. By Keith Payne. Viking. 272 pp. $29.

The election of 2024 serves as a reminder, if we need one, that Americans are deeply divided about politics, policies and the threat to democracy. In Good Reasonable People, Keith Payne (a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and author of The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects The Way We Think, Live, and Die) draws on studies in his field and his own experiences growing up in a working-class, Christian family in rural Kentucky to provide an analysis of what political scientists, political strategists and politicians know but the rest of us don’t fully understand: the decisions most voters make about American politics reflect the “meaning and mission” of the group – ethnic, racial, religious and national – to which they feel most closely connected.

To demonstrate that most of us do not have a coherent, consistent set of political principles or “issue opinions,” Payne cites a study in which participants completed surveys on a range of topics, such as whether the government should impose a tax on wealth or monitor citizens’ phone calls........

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