The Connection Opportunity

Our research identifies a “lack of opportunity” as the most frequently cited barrier to building connections across difference. Therefore, one clear strategy is also the most straightforward: namely, create more opportunities for people to make connections across difference with others in their daily lives. This can be done in two main ways: one, provide more opportunities for meaningful connection in spaces where people are already coming together, and two, design environments where new connections can happen naturally. 

Additionally, creating more spaces in which people can easily come together to solve community problems—what More in Common refers to as “collective settings”—is essential. These settings are not only a space where people build trust and relationships with each other, but also develop the skills to work through differences and tackle local problems.

Those most likely to connect across difference believe that connection is a community norm. Key factors that shape community and social norms include the media, one’s immediate social and physical environments, and institutional policy. Efforts to uplift stories of connection, model social connection, and support policies that signal communities are welcoming to all can, in turn, foster a culture that values and supports cross-group connection.

Our data show that the more people feel like they belong in their local community, the more they express interest in connecting across lines of difference. Therefore, fostering a sense of community belonging is likely an important aspect of supporting people’s willingness to bridge differences.

To increase community belonging, local leaders can ensure spaces (like annual community events, neighborhood association meetings, etc.) highlight a shared identity across many segments of the population. It is also important to ensure that, in these spaces, community members from varied backgrounds feel like they are valued, that their rights and opinions are respected, and that they have the agency to contribute to community goals. 

Americans report that they would be more interested in connecting across difference if the interactions focused on common goals and shared interests. As such, creating opportunities that emphasize shared community goals, interests, and activities may attract a larger and more diverse set of participants.

We found that the second most important predictor of interest in connection across all lines of difference was low feelings of intergroup anxiety. The less anxious—or more comfortable—people think they will feel while interacting across lines of difference, the more interested they are in doing it. There are many ways to reduce intergroup anxiety; our study highlights two. The first is to correct Americans’ misperceptions; namely, some Americans believe their fellow citizens are less interested in connecting across difference than they actually are. Correcting these misperceptions can promote connection. The second is to increase Americans’ confidence in their abilities to engage across differences by helping them build skills to communicate and work together with people of different backgrounds and beliefs.

The more people feel a responsibility to connect, the more they express interest in all types of activities that bring people together. Thus, strengthening a sense of collective responsibility may be a powerful way to increase people’s willingness to connect. To do this, community leaders can highlight in public messages and communication how collaboration across differences has been essential to major advancements in the US, such as expanding civil rights, strengthening democratic institutions, and promoting economic innovation.

Our research finds that positive experiences of connection (e.g., forming cross-group friendships) may catalyze further interest in connecting in the future. This suggests that experiences of and interest in connection may build on themselves in a self-reinforcing cycle. To take advantage of such cascading interest, organizations need to create sustained opportunities for engagement and bridging.

We focused on four lines of difference—race/ethnicity, religion, political ideology, and socioeconomic status—because they are frequently discussed in everyday life. They also represent a range of both visible social identities (e.g., race) and not often visible identities (e.g., political ideology). This approach allowed us to examine whether there are important differences or shared factors in the predictors and barriers to connection across the four lines.

When conducting research that relies on self-reported behavior and beliefs, there is always the possibility that some participants may adjust their responses to present themselves in a more favorable light—a phenomenon known as social desirability bias. However, we implemented several measures to mitigate this risk and ensure the reliability of our findings. 

We first asked respondents whether they felt pressured to respond a certain way to the survey questions; only 5 percent of respondents reported feeling a “strong” pressure. Even when we exclude these respondents from our analysis, our primary findings remain consistent with only minor variations of a few percentage points. As a result, our data suggest that social desirability bias is unlikely to have significantly impacted our results.

While no self-reported research is entirely immune to bias, these checks provide strong confidence that our conclusions are robust and not meaningfully distorted by social desirability effects. For more information, see “Strengths and Limitations of the Data” in Appendix B of The Connection Opportunity report.  

We used standard demographic survey questions to measure participants’ identity both in our survey work and focus group work. Respondents were asked to provide basic demographic information, including age, gender, and education. They also self-reported information relevant to the identities we were examining, namely their race and ethnicity, religion (and level of religious participation), political ideology (on a scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative”), and socioeconomic status (subjective status).  For more information, see “Survey Question Wording” in Appendix D of The Connection Opportunity report.

Variable selection was informed by the results of a broad literature review on the topics of social connection and intergroup contact. From this review, we identified several factors that we aimed to target for this report. We prioritized psychological and values-related factors as we anticipated that such factors would both be measurable using survey instruments (and represent judgments for which people often have insight) and be potentially malleable (i.e., factors that interventions might be able to target). Of course, these factors are not exhaustive, and there are factors in the literature that are not covered in this report or are outside of its scope.

At the time of writing, the United States has entered a new political chapter. A combination of executive orders and institutional instability – and Americans’ differing perspectives on these events – means that how everyday Americans relate to one another may be more in flux than ever before. While we can’t predict all the ways that the social fabric of America will be changed as a result, we believe that the results presented here nonetheless remain robust. For example, we find that many of the results from the national survey are replicated in our regional work and recontact work; that is, we find consistent patterns in independent samples of respondents. Our data was also collected from respondents at different time points, some of which were taken during a divisive election period, yet displayed consistent patterns.

Additionally in January 2025, More in Common conducted a poll which found that 82 percent of Americans believe that “our success as a nation depends on our ability to work together across differences.” When asked to reflect on the future, Americans across political parties most desire the country to be “united.”  

Finally, our research focuses on Americans’ interest in connecting with one another, not on their relationships or feelings towards national politics. While political dynamics undoubtedly shape how some people engage with others (which is evident in our research), we also consistently find that political identity is not the most important identity for the majority of Americans. As a result, political identity does not need to be the focus of every “bridging” activity, which presents a key opportunity. The organizations featured in our report, for example, show that connection across difference is possible even in turbulent political moments. While this new political era inevitably poses novel challenges to overcoming division, our findings indicate that we should never underestimate Americans’ willingness to come together.