The campaign has been all about irreconcilable differences — on health care, on spending and climate, on who’s a lunatic and who’s a tyrant. Political handicappers expect at best a divided government, and at worst a paralyzed, feuding one: “Survivor: Washington, D.C.,” with gavels and filibusters in place of bonfires and tribal headbands.

But recent research suggests that several strong but subtle psychological factors will be pushing Democrats and Republicans in an unexpected direction — toward engagement instead of name-calling and nastiness. These forces, rooted in the nature of personal identity and the rhythm of one-on-one interaction, are present when any antagonists meet; they can blunt even sharp ideological differences.

“We’ve done a good job of documenting how harshly humans treat their enemies throughout evolution,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Born to be Good” (Norton, 2009). “But we also have evidence of an early shift in human evolution to hypersociality — a default orientation toward trust, toward sharing resources, toward forgiveness.”

Without putting aside their differences, he went on, humans have a “profound capacity through which vicious adversaries can form alliances.”

Political insiders are skeptical that this will happen soon, especially if some of the strongest opponents of the president are elected. “These candidates believe they’re being sent to undo what’s been done,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant. “They don’t even want to be seen” dealing with opponents.

Still, people tend to exaggerate their differences with opponents to begin with, research suggests, especially in the company of fellow partisans. In small groups organized around a cause, for instance, members are prone to one-up one another; the most extreme tend to rise the most quickly, making the group look more radical than it is.

For this and other reasons — including media coverage of the political fringes — Americans as a rule overestimate the policy differences between so-called red and blue voters.

A series of recent studies demonstrates how quickly large differences can be put aside, under some circumstances. In one, a team of psychologists had a group of college students who scored very high on measures of patriotism read and critique an essay titled “Beyond the Rhetoric: Understanding the Recent Terrorist Attacks in Context,” which argued that the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to American policy in the Middle East.

The students judged the report harshly — unless, prompted by the researchers, they had first described a memory that they were proud of. This group, flush with the image of having acted with grace or courage, was significantly more open to at least considering the case spelled out in the essay than those who had recounted a memory of having failed to exhibit their most prized personal quality.

Confronting an opposing political view is a threat to identity, but “if you remind people of what they value in some other domain of their life, it lessens the pain,” said the lead author, Geoffrey L. Cohen, a social psychologist at Stanford. “It opens them up to information that they might not otherwise consider.”

Psychologists draw out these memories in the lab by asking people to describe a personal strength and an occasion when it was on display. But daily life is full of triggers too, whether in an unexpected call from an old friend, a question from a child or an evocative sight — one’s family portrait, say, propped up under the desk lamp as a reminder of what matters most.

The effect of such affirmations seems especially pronounced in people who boast strong convictions. In a follow-up experiment, the research team had supporters of abortion-rights act out a negotiation with an opponent on an abortion bill. Again, participants who were prompted to recall a treasured memory beforehand were more open to seeking areas of agreement and more respectful of their opposite’s position than those not so prompted.

And most fair-minded of all were participants who recalled such a memory and also reaffirmed their beliefs on abortion rights before the role-playing. “This is contrary to what many assume,” Dr. Cohen said. “But the combination of the two made for the greatest distance traveled to meet an adversary, to look for a middle ground.”

Private values — memories, affirmations — may well have played a role in some historic compromises. During the negotiations in 1978 to achieve what would become the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, appeared ready to walk away. President Jimmy Carter, who coordinated the talks, made a personal visit to Mr. Begin, bringing him autographed photographs of the meeting, addressed to each of the prime minister’s eight grandchildren.

Over the years in my quest to lose weight, friends, family members and, most recently, readers of this blog, have been generous with their advice. They tell me, often with a passion that borders on the fanatical, that the key to weight loss is (fill in the blank).

The feedback goes something like this:

You can’t be healthy until you lose weight. You need to accept your body as it is.

All calories are the same. No calorie is the same

Stop eating carbs. Stop eating fat. Eat anything you want, in moderation.

Forget the vegetarian thing; you need to eat meat. Forget the vegetarian thing; you need to be vegan.

Keep track of your weight. Never get on a scale again.

I’ve learned that weight loss may be tied to things I’d never considered: fatty livers, leptin deficiencies, sleep patterns, breathing. I’ve been told to fast, juice cleanse, attend Overeaters Anonymous, track my progress on Twitter, listen to weight-loss podcasts, grow my own food, spend more time at the beach. One friend took the fear route and told me that if I don’t lose weight now, I’ll be in diapers by the time I’m 60.

I want to seriously consider every morsel of weight-loss advice, from crackpot plans to holistic approaches, in order to make up my own mind about what will work for me and my body. But the more advice I get, the more convinced I am that there’s only one person to whom I really need to listen: myself.

If there is anything good that can come from the struggle to lose weight, it’s the fact that you learn a lot about yourself in the process.

I know that for me, exercise remains my biggest challenge. I’m not exercising at all now, other than walking to work, and I know that needs to change. I just need to find the regimen that appeals to me, and that I really believe I can stick to long-term. Am I lazy? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to reconsider. I do know that telling me to “just do it,” as one marathon-running, skinny-since-birth friend of mine recently opined, won’t make it happen. I’m still trying to figure out what will.

I also know that I have a love-hate relationship with food. At several points in my life — birthdays, New Year’s Eve, random Mondays — I’ve said, “This is the day I’m going to start eating healthy and exercise more,” only to return, tail between legs, to bad habits a month later. Perhaps I get bored easily, or let my emotions drive my diet and exercise habits. Whatever the reason, I still need to learn more about the emotions that accompany my eating.

Finally, I know that for me, being a vegetarian is more important than losing weight; I won’t consider an eating plan that includes meat no matter how much weight it might help me to lose. For me it’s an ethical choice — about killing animals, mostly — that is far too integral to who I am as a person to suddenly change. My light-bulb moment happened at age 16, the day a loud-mouthed classmate gasped and pointed at the blood-filled vein sticking out of a chicken leg I was about to gnaw on. I stopped eating animals over the course of the next few months, and lost about 10 pounds as a result. My meat-loving mother once joked: “I’m fine with you being gay. But when is this whole vegetarian phase going to be over?” It’s not.

I recently returned from a two-week vacation in Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris. At times, my only vegetarian options were butter-bursting croissants and heavy cheeses. But I lost five pounds.

Maybe it was all the walking, or the small portions. The trip spurred me to start seeing a nutritionist, who can help me integrate what I learned about how Europeans eat, and what it means to be an urban vegetarian with a weight-loss goal. And I’m hoping that by talking — and writing — about eating, I can keep on listening to myself and start making smarter choices.