Professor Kraus' research interests include how people perceive and explain the attainment of social status, how these status perceptions influence emotions and behavior in both cooperative and competitive settings, and how emotions guide group behavior. In particular, Professor Kraus' work explores how people born into lower socioeconomic status families tend to engage in social judgments and behaviors suggesting that they value social connections more highly than their higher socioeconomic status counterparts, and how early physical contact (e.g., high fives) between teammates on professional basketball teams predicts enhanced team performance over time. His work appears in journals such as Psychological Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Psychological Science, and Emotion, and has been covered in the popular press by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Kraus is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and serves as a consulting editor at a number of academic journals including JPSP and Perspectives on Psychological Science among others. He currently teaches Power and Politics at Yale SOM along with courses on team management.
