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Michael Kraus (psychologist)

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Michael Kraus
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley (BA, MA, PhD)
Known forinequality, social class, racism, emotion
Children2
Scientific career
FieldsSocial psychology
InstitutionsUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Yale University
Northwestern University
ThesisSocial Class, Essentialism, and Restorative Policy Decisions (2010)
Dacher Keltner
Websitewww.michaelwkraus.com

Michael W. Kraus is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at Northwestern University.[1] He currently leads the Contending with Societal Inequality Laboratory.[2] Previously, he was an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. His research examines inequality, race, power, emotion, empathy, and social cognition.[1] Kraus is known for research on social class, status signaling, racial economic inequality, and public misperceptions of racial progress.[3][4]

Education

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Kraus received his B.A. in psychology and sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. He later earned an M.A. in psychology from Berkeley in 2006 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 2010.[5]

Career

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Kraus was a psychology and medicine postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco from 2010 to 2012, and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2012 to 2015.[5]

In 2015, Kraus joined the Yale School of Management as an assistant professor of organizational behavior. He was promoted to associate professor in 2020 and held a courtesy appointment in psychology.[5] His work at Yale included research on social class, prejudice, racial inequality, inequality misperception, and organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion.[6][7]

In 2022, Yale denied Kraus tenure, a decision that drew public attention and debate in higher education.[8][9] An open letter signed by numerous academics urged Yale to reconsider the decision and raised concerns about colorblindness and the evaluation of scholarship on racism and inequality.[10][11] Kraus later wrote about the experience in The Chronicle of Higher Education.[12]

Kraus was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation during the 2023–2024 academic year.[13] In 2024, he joined Northwestern University as professor of psychology and Morton O. Schapiro Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.[14]

Research

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Kraus's research examines how inequality shapes social perception, emotion, interpersonal behavior, and public beliefs about society.[15]

His early work examined social class as a psychological and cultural context. With Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, and colleagues, Kraus argued that lower-class contexts tend to foster contextual awareness and interdependence, whereas upper-class contexts tend to foster agency and self-focus.[16][17]

Kraus has also studied how social class is communicated through behavioral signals. In a 2009 study, Kraus and Keltner found that observers could infer socioeconomic status from brief video clips of social interaction.[18] In later work, he examined class signals in clothing and speech.[19][20]

Kraus's work on economic mobility has examined how Americans overestimate the likelihood of upward class mobility. In a 2015 New York Times opinion, Kraus discussed research showing that Americans overestimate the accessibility of the American dream.[21][22]

Another area of Kraus's research concerns emotion, empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior. In a 2010 study of the National Basketball Association, Kraus and colleagues found that early-season physical touch among teammates predicted later individual and team performance, with cooperation accounting for the association between touch and team performance.[23] The study later received attention in professional sports, including coverage of Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen referencing it in discussions of team culture.[24]

In work with Jennifer Richeson and colleagues, Kraus has studied public misperceptions of racial economic inequality. In a 2017 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kraus et al. reported that Americans substantially overestimated Black–White economic equality across several domains.[25] A 2019 article argued that Americans underestimate racial economic inequality, especially the Black–White wealth gap, in part because of racial progress narratives and meritocracy beliefs.[26] Kraus has written about these themes in public commentary, including in the Los Angeles Times.[27]

Recent work by Kraus has examined anti-Asian racism,[28] Asian American solidarity,[29] and misperceptions of Asian representation. In a recent paper, his lab studied perceptions of Asian subgroup representation in STEM, finding that participants misperceived representation among Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese subgroups.[30]

Awards and honors

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Selected publications

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Michael Kraus". Northwestern University Department of Psychology.
  2. ^ "CSI Lab Current Members". Contending with Societal Inequality: A Social Science Laboratory.
  3. ^ a b "Michael W. Kraus". Association for Psychological Science.
  4. ^ "5 questions for Michael Kraus". American Psychological Association. March 2021.
  5. ^ a b c d e f "Michael W. Kraus curriculum vitae" (PDF). Northwestern University Department of Psychology.
  6. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Torrez, Brittany; Hollie, LaStarr (February 2022). "How narratives of racial progress create barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations". Current Opinion in Psychology. 43: 108–113. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.022. PMID 34340144.
  7. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Brown, Xanni; Swoboda, Hannah (September 2019). "Dog whistle mascots: Native American mascots as normative expressions of prejudice". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 84 103810. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2019.04.008.
  8. ^ "SOM tenure denial sparks debate on diversity in academia". Yale Daily News.
  9. ^ "Recent tenure denial cases raise questions". Inside Higher Ed. May 19, 2022.
  10. ^ "Open letter to Yale's Provost Office and School of Management concerning Professor Michael Kraus' tenure case".
  11. ^ Jeffries-EL, Malika (2022-12-14). "How Do We Mitigate the Impact of Systemic Bias on Faculty from Underrepresented Groups?". AAAS | IUSE. Archived from the original on 2026-02-18.
  12. ^ Kraus, Michael W. (2023). "How I survived tenure denial". The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  13. ^ "Michael W. Kraus". Russell Sage Foundation.
  14. ^ "Michael Kraus". Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research.
  15. ^ "Michael W. Kraus".
  16. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Piff, Paul K.; Keltner, Dacher (2011). "Social class as culture: The convergence of resources and rank in the social realm". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 20 (4): 246–250. doi:10.1177/0963721411414654.
  17. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Piff, Paul K.; Mendoza-Denton, Rodolfo; Rheinschmidt, Michelle L.; Keltner, Dacher (2012). "Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor". Psychological Review. 119 (3): 546–572. doi:10.1037/a0028756. PMID 22775498.
  18. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Keltner, Dacher (2009). "Signs of socioeconomic status: A thin-slicing approach". Psychological Science. 20 (1): 99–106. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02251.x. PMID 19076316.
  19. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Mendes, Wendy Berry (2014). "Sartorial symbols of social class elicit class-consistent behavioral and physiological responses: A dyadic approach". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 143 (6): 2330–2340. doi:10.1037/xge0000023. PMID 25222264.
  20. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Torrez, Brittany; Park, Jun Won; Ghayebi, Fariba (2019). "Evidence for the reproduction of social class in brief speech". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (46): 22998–23003. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11622998K. doi:10.1073/pnas.1900500116. PMC 6859342. PMID 31636176.
  21. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Davidai, Shai; Nussbaum, A. David (May 1, 2015). "American Dream? Or Mirage?". The New York Times.
  22. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Tan, Jacinth J. X. (2015). "Americans overestimate social class mobility". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 58: 101–111. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2015.01.005.
  23. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Huang, Cassy; Keltner, Dacher (2010). "Tactile communication, cooperation, and performance: An ethological study of the NBA". Emotion. 10 (5): 745–749. doi:10.1037/a0019382. PMID 21038960.
  24. ^ Devlin, Elise (September 19, 2025). "What is the 'power of touch?' An NFL head coach believes it can help his team win". The Athletic.
  25. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Rucker, Julian M.; Richeson, Jennifer A. (2017). "Americans misperceive racial economic equality". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114 (39): 10324–10331. Bibcode:2017PNAS..11410324K. doi:10.1073/pnas.1707719114. PMC 5625917. PMID 28923915.
  26. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Onyeador, Ivuoma N.; Daumeyer, Natalie M.; Rucker, Julian M.; Richeson, Jennifer A. (2019). "The misperception of racial economic inequality". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 14 (6): 899–921. doi:10.1177/1745691619863049. PMID 31505132.
  27. ^ Kraus, Michael W. (February 28, 2022). "Deep racial inequality persists in the U.S.—but many Americans don't want to believe it". Los Angeles Times.
  28. ^ Vinluan, Aeroelay Chyei; Kraus, Michael W. (2026-03-04). Gobel, Matt (ed.). "Asian American Worker Experiences of Remote Work, Discrimination, and Solidarity". Collabra: Psychology. 12 (1) 158154. doi:10.1525/collabra.158154. ISSN 2474-7394.
  29. ^ Kraus, Michael W.; Vinluan, A. Chyei (2023-11-07). "Reminders of Japanese redress increase Asian American support for Black reparations". Communications Psychology. 1 (1): 33. doi:10.1038/s44271-023-00033-w. ISSN 2731-9121. PMC 11332238. PMID 39242852.
  30. ^ Vinluan, A. Chyei; Kraus, Michael W. (2026). "The misperception of Asian subgroup representation in STEM". Communications Psychology. 4 (1) 21. doi:10.1038/s44271-025-00389-1. PMC 12873391. PMID 41484181.
  31. ^ www.apa.org http://web.archive.org/web/20220121033541/https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/committee/cses-annual-report-2017.pdf. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-01-21. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  32. ^ "SAGE Young Scholars | SPSP". spsp.org.
  33. ^ "2020 SPSP & APA Division 8 Fellows Announced | SPSP". spsp.org.
  34. ^ "Graduate Mentor Awards (Faculty) | Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences". gsas.yale.edu.
  35. ^ Kraus, Michael W. (2025-09-16). "A note on awards for diversity and science". Medium. Archived from the original on 2025-09-17.
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