Michael Kraus
Special guest
Michael Kraus is a social psychologist who specializes in the study of inequality. His current work explores the behaviors and emotional states that maintain and perpetuate economic and social inequality in society. He also studies the emotional processes that allow individuals and teams to work together more effectively. Michael’s research has appeared in Psychological Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He currently teaches Power & Politics and Global Virtual Teams in the Yale SOM core curriculum.
Michael Kraus has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Episode 6: Wisdom, Class & Inequality (with Michael Kraus)
July 16th, 2018 | 1 hr 3 mins
class, culture, inequality, marshmallow test, psychology, social psychology, wisdom
If a typical white family in the US has 100 dollars, how many dollars does a typical black US family have? Wrong! Why are we so bad at guessing levels of inequality in society? How much of a role does your class play in preventing wise decision-making? Are upper and middle-class people especially bad at taking wise decisions? Why does more education equate to less wise reasoning in interpersonal affairs? And just how good are we at spotting someone’s class from their shoes or even eyes? Michael Kraus joins Igor and Charles to tease economic fact from fiction, discussing accuracy of class signalling, implications of new marshmallow-based research, woeful underestimations of inequality, and the roots of our convenient blindness. Igor breaks down surprising research suggesting that we should both pay more attention to how working class people approach interpersonal clashes and be wary of disruptive hipster beards, Michael forces us to look at the dark underbelly of the American dream, and Charles has questions about Jay-Z and the validity of cockney impersonations as a measurement tool. Welcome to Episode 6.