There are serious stakes to the election, including democracy issues and abortion rights — but the intense, vitriolic polarization we’re experiencing now is largely based on our perceptions about each other, according to research from Johns Hopkins University professor Lilliana Mason

Mason, a professor of political science at the university’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s Agora Institute, says this type of division, which she calls affective polarization, doesn’t require us to have wildly different policy disagreements to hate each other. Instead, she told Vox, “it’s based on feelings,” as well as misunderstandings about which groups, and what kind of people, are on the other side.