INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Faculty Spotlight: Michael Kraus

An IPR psychologist studies race and class, motivated by his education and family history

Michael Kraus meets with members of his Contending with Societal Inequality Lab.

“I think about progress in a lot of ways,” said psychologist Michael Kraus at an IPR colloquium on Jan. 27 where he discussed his research on Americans’ beliefs about racial progress. “I think progress is possible. I think it has happened in my lifetime.”

Kraus, who wore a navy blazer and light blue button-up shirt, looked out at the audience as he placed both hands on a small podium and leaned into it.

After pulling up a slide with a photo of himself as a child next to a photo of his two children, he compared his sixth-grade experience at the library to his daughter’s. He remembers going to his school’s library and learning basics like how to use the card catalog. Today, his sixth-grade daughter’s librarian leads students in critical conversations about why some books are banned.

“Protecting our ability to speak truth to racial inequality as it exists in society is something we should all value and pay attention to,” Kraus said, noting that while progress is possible, it’s not automatic or guaranteed.

Thinking About the World More Structurally 

Growing up in a middle-class home in San Diego, Kraus didn’t think much about race or class. Instead he was taught to focus, work hard, and make good on the sacrifices family members had made on his behalf. It wasn’t until he attended the University of California, Berkeley that he began to develop a deeper understanding of how race and class shape society.  There, he started taking sociology classes that helped him think about the world more structurally and how it’s organized.

“I had consciousness-raising experiences in that context that I think helped me really understand my past experiences,” Kraus said.

Around this time, Kraus also learned more about his family history from his grandmother living in Oakland. During World War II, she narrowly escaped being incarcerated at an internment camp for people of Japanese descent as a child. Federal officials came to her rural Idaho town to forcibly remove Japanese Americans during the war, but neighbors stopped officials from taking her and her family. 

“I think what really helped me gravitate towards the scholarship was also surfacing some of this family history,” Kraus explained, as he found out more about his grandmother’s life after college.

Kraus, who went on to earn a PhD in social psychology from Berkeley, is now a professor of psychology and a Morton O. Schapiro Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. He founded and runs the Contending with Societal Inequality Lab, where he and his students examine how people experience inequality and how those experiences shape decisions and behavior.

“I think we push things forward that help people see the world in truer, more complex, difficult ways, but ways that reflect reality,” he said. “I think that really helps people, and it certainly helped me understand my life.”

The “Stickiness” of People’s Beliefs About Race

In 2017 and 2019, Kraus and his co-authors, including IPR psychologist Ivy Onyeador, published studies showing that Americans vastly overestimate racial economic equality.

“It was right around the first Trump election where we started that work—mostly it came out of thinking about perceptions of society and how it's changing,” he said. “And we were reacting to this tension where people have this shocked reaction to the fact that inequalities are pretty consistent across time.”

The studies, which received widespread media coverage, point to misperceptions about the gap in resources like wealth and income between Black and White Americans. Study participants believed that for every $100 in wealth the average White family has, a Black family had $90. In reality, the average Black family has only $10.

“I think we were struck by the stickiness of this progress belief system,” Kraus said. Subsequent studies reveal how challenging it can be to change people’s beliefs about racial progress.

His more recent research finds the same optimistic beliefs about the workplace: People think more Black managers lead organizations than actually do. In some cases, Black managers are seen as overrepresented in management compared to the percentage they make up of the U.S. population. 

For some, the desire to declare racial injustice as a thing of the past can make it difficult for people to come to terms with the persistence of racial inequality, he argues.

“That desire is so great that even somebody like me, who knows about all the federal statistics about racial inequalities, will make that equality so in my mind before it actually happens in the world through law and policy,” Kraus said.

These beliefs can have real consequences for rhetoric and action around racial equality.

“They matter for policy in particular, like what kinds of policy debates are likely to be seated in discussions of policy change versus which ones are dead on arrival,” Kraus explained. He says that people are less likely to support policies to make society more equitable if they believe injustice doesn’t exist.

What Is Equitable and ‘Enough?’

While people are motivated to see society as just and equitable, many also want to believe that resources are distributed fairly, Kraus says. That motivation led him to study how people understand one another when it comes to social class.

Kraus finds that people can easily determine a person’s class just by looking at a few of their Facebook photos, and hiring managers make assumptions about a candidate’s socioeconomic background based on how they speak. Hiring managers will then come to conclusions about a candidate’s fit, competence, and starting salary for a job based on their class—favoring candidates from higher social classes. 

“We have these notions about merit and deservingness, and we make a lot of judgments based on that,” said Kraus. “All of these studies point out the problems with that.”

These biases can prevent us from recognizing the strengths in people from across social classes, he explains.

A recent line of research looks at how much people think is enough to live on. It finds that people generally believe a living wage is higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and the proposed minimum wage of $15 an hour.

In light of conversations about how the economy shaped the 2024 election, Kraus said, “I wouldn't discount how people feel about their economic situations,” whether or not they have an accurate sense of the economy.

Many in the U.S., he says, are just one catastrophic event away from complete financial ruin. Conversations about what is enough to live on need to be more comprehensive and involve not just economists but also psychologists

“It has to involve things like dignity, leisure, [and] security,” he said. “It has to be a very different conversation that I think is psychological in nature.”

Michael Kraus is a professor of psychology and an IPR Morton O. Schapiro fellow.

Photo credit: Laura McDermott

Published: January 29, 2025.