Publications by authors named "Michael W Kraus"

Informational interventions can shape policy attitudes, and in this study, we examined whether largely unknown information about past reparations payments toward one minoritized group would shape current policy judgments. In 1942, the U.S.

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Unlabelled: Higher resting heart rate variability (HRV)-an index of more flexible response to environmental stressors, including noxious stimuli-has been linked to reduced perception of experimentally induced pain. However, as stress responses are adapted to one's chronic environments, we propose that chronic exposure to threats captured by one's subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) may shape different adaptations that produce distinct pain responses linked to higher resting HRV. Specifically, lower SSS individuals with more threat exposures may prioritize threat detection by upregulating sensitivity to stressors, such as acute pain.

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Despite a checkered racial history, people in the United States generally believe the nation has made steady, incremental progress toward achieving racial equality. In this article, we investigate whether this U.S.

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Scholars of color remain underrepresented in US institutions in academia. In this paper, we will examine one factor that contributes to their continued marginalization in psychology and management: the scientific method's commitment to traditional notions of objectivity. We argue that objectivity-defined as practices and policies rooted in the heightened value placed on a research process that is ostensibly free from bias-is central to the prominence of primarily White scholarship in psychology and management research and remains central to knowledge production.

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Although the association between objective markers of low socioeconomic status (SES) and poor health is well established, one underexamined possibility is that over and above objective SES, social class stigma-experiences and anticipation of discrimination based on social class-might undermine people's ability to engage in healthy behaviors. Participants (N = 2022) were recruited between December 2019 and January 2020 via a national Qualtrics panel that was census-matched to the U.S.

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A field experiment ( = 4,536) examined how signs of social class influence compassionate responses to those in need. Pedestrians in two major cities in the United States were exposed to a confederate wearing symbols of relatively high or low social class who was requesting money to help the homeless. Compassionate responding was assessed by measuring the donation amount of the pedestrians walking past the target.

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Americans remain unaware of the magnitude of economic inequality in the nation and the degree to which it is patterned by race. We exposed a community sample of respondents to one of three interventions designed to promote a more realistic understanding of the Black-White wealth gap. The interventions conformed to recommendations in messaging about racial inequality drawn from the social sciences yet differed in how they highlighted data-based trends in Black-White wealth inequality, a single personal narrative, or both.

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Despite statements in support of racial justice, many organizations fail to make good on their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In this review, we describe the role of the narrative of racial progress-which conceives of society as rapidly and automatically ascending toward racial equity-in these failures. Specifically, the narrative (1) envisions organizations as race neutral, (2) creates barriers to complex cross-race discussions about equity, (3) creates momentum for less effective policy change, and (4) reduces urgency around DEI goals.

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In their analysis in a previous issue of , Roberts and colleagues argued that the editors, authors, and participants throughout subfields of psychological science are overwhelmingly White. In this commentary, we consider some of the drivers and consequences of this racial inequality. Drawing on race scholarship from within and outside the field, we highlight three phenomena that create and maintain racial inequality in psychology: (a) racial ignorance, (b) threats to belonging, and (c) racial-progress narratives.

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This meta-analysis tested if the links between socioeconomic status (SES) and subjective well-being (SWB) differ by whether SES is assessed objectively or subjectively. The associations between measures of objective SES (i.e.

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Although there has been limited progress toward economic equality between Americans over the past half-century, many Americans are largely unaware of the persistence of economic racial disparities. One intervention for this widespread ignorance is to inform White Americans of the impact of racism on the outcomes of Black Americans. In two studies, we attempted to improve the accuracy of Whites' perceptions of racial progress and estimates of contemporary racial economic equality.

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Economic inequality is at its highest point on record and is linked to poorer health and well-being across countries. The forces that perpetuate inequality continue to be studied, and here we examine how a person's position within the economic hierarchy, their social class, is accurately perceived and reproduced by mundane patterns embedded in brief speech. Studies 1 through 4 examined the extent that people accurately perceive social class based on brief speech patterns.

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Racial economic inequality is a foundational feature of the United States, yet many Americans appear oblivious to it. In the present work we consider the psychology underlying this collective willful ignorance. Drawing on prior research and new evidence from a nationally representative sample of adults ( = 1,008), we offer compelling evidence that Americans vastly underestimate racial economic inequality, especially the racial wealth gap.

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Here, we look ahead to a psychology of power that is embedded in societal structures, specifically with regard to the North American context of race, gender, and social class. We argue that studies of power are limited when decoupled from these societal structures of power and we make this argument by examining dominant working definitions and links between power and prosociality. We end with a suggestion that a fully embedded and historical psychological account of social power will require greater constraints on generality, additional descriptive work on the experience of power in everyday life, and methods and samples that bring research on social power out of university spaces and into the places, spaces, and institutions where that power is intertwined.

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In his comment, Rossiter (2018) claims that voice-only communication elicits improvements in empathic accuracy that are "so slight as to not be of any practical importance" (p. 689). In this reply, I acknowledge that the reported experiments from Kraus (2017) produced small effects and are limited in terms of what they can conclude about empathic accuracy.

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This research tests the prediction that voice-only communication increases empathic accuracy over communication across senses. We theorized that people often intentionally communicate their feelings and internal states through the voice, and as such, voice-only communication allows perceivers to focus their attention on the channel of communication most active and accurate in conveying emotions to others. We used 5 experiments to test this hypothesis (N = 1,772), finding that voice-only communication elicits higher rates of empathic accuracy relative to vision-only and multisense communication both while engaging in interactions and perceiving emotions in recorded interactions of strangers.

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The present research documents the widespread misperception of race-based economic equality in the United States. Across four studies ( = 1,377) sampling White and Black Americans from the top and bottom of the national income distribution, participants overestimated progress toward Black-White economic equality, largely driven by estimates of greater current equality than actually exists according to national statistics. Overestimates of current levels of racial economic equality, on average, outstripped reality by roughly 25% and were predicted by greater belief in a just world and social network racial diversity (among Black participants).

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We examined changes over four decades and between ethnic groups in how people define their social class. Changes included the increasing importance of income, decreasing importance of occupational prestige, and the demise of the "Victorian bargain," in which poor people who subscribed to conservative sexual and religious norms could think of themselves as middle class. The period also saw changes (among Whites) and continuity (among Black Americans) in subjective status perceptions.

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Individual agency accounts of social class persist in society and even in psychological science despite clear evidence for the role of social structures. This article argues that social class is defined by the structural dynamics of society. Specifically, access to powerful networks, groups, and institutions, and inequalities in wealth and other economic resources shape proximal social environments that influence how individuals express their internal states and motivations.

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By some accounts, global economic inequality is at its highest point on record. The pernicious effects of this broad societal trend are striking: Rising inequality is linked to poorer health and well-being across countries, continents, and cultures. The economic and psychological forces that perpetuate inequality continue to be studied, and in this theoretical review, we examine the role of daily experiences of economic inequality-the communication of social class signals between interaction partners-in this process.

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Historically high levels of economic inequality likely have important consequences for relationships between people of the same and different social class backgrounds. Here, we test the prediction that social affiliation among same-class partners is stronger at the extremes of the class spectrum, given that these groups are highly distinctive and most separated from others by institutional and economic forces. An internal meta-analysis of 4 studies (N = 723) provided support for this hypothesis.

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Kraus and Tan (2015) hypothesized that Americans tend to overestimate social class mobility in society, and do so because they seek to protect the self. This paper reports a pre-registered exact replication of Study 3 from this original paper and finds, consistent with the original study, that Americans substantially overestimate social class mobility, that people provide greater overestimates when made while thinking of similar others, and that high perceived social class is related to greater overestimates. The current results provide additional evidence consistent with the idea that people overestimate class mobility to protect their beliefs in the promise of equality of opportunity.

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The economic conditions of one's life can profoundly and systematically influence health outcomes over the life course. Our present research demonstrates that rejecting the notion that social class categories are biologically determined-a nonessentialist belief-buffers lower-class individuals from poor self-rated health and negative affect, whereas conceiving of social class categories as rooted in biology-an essentialist belief-does not. In Study 1, lower-class individuals self-reported poorer health than upper-class individuals when they endorsed essentialist beliefs but showed no such difference when they rejected such beliefs.

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Social class ranks people on the social ladder of society, and in this research we examine how perceptions of economic standing shape the way that individuals evaluate the self. Given that reminders of one's own subordinate status in society are an indicator of how society values the self in comparison to others, we predicted that chronic lower perceptions of economic standing vis-à-vis others would explain associations between objective social class and negative self-evaluation, whereas situation-specific reminders of low economic standing would elicit negative self-evaluations, particularly in those from lower-class backgrounds. In Study 1, perceptions of social class rank accounted for the positive relationship between objective material resource measures of social class and self-esteem.

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