Robert Kraut graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Lehigh University in 1968 and received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Yale University in 1973. He joined the sociology faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and moved to Cornell University in 1974.

In 1979, Dr. Kraut and his Cornell psychology colleague Robert E. Johnston a published an article studying smiling behavior among bowlers, hockey fans, and pedestrians. Their findings suggested that smiling emerges in response to social motivations rather than emotional experience and serves an important role in nonverbal communication. Although it substantiated theories in the emerging field of evolutionary psychology, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire identified this federally-sponsored research as an instance of wasteful government spending and highlighted it in March 1980 with a "Golden Fleece Award".

In 1980, Kraut joined Bell Labs as a visiting scientist and departed Cornell in 1981 to become a full-time scientist working in Bell's Interface Planning group. Following the 1984 Bell System divestiture, he worked in the Behavioral Science research group at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) and later became the director of the Interpersonal Communication research. During his tenure at Bell, Kraut was also a visiting lecturer & fellow at Princeton University. In 1993, Kraut left Bellcore and accepted a full-time faculty appointment at Carnegie Mellon University as a professor of social psychology and human computer interaction. Kraut was named the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human Computer Interaction in 2000.

He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2003. He is board member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the US National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Society.

He has published more than 100 articles, papers and books. His most recent work examines factors influencing the success of online communities and ways to apply psychology theory to their design. This includes academic studies about Wikipedia, for example, research with Aniket Kittur on the condition that lead to better quality in Wikipedia articles and with Moira Burke in predicting successful candidates for Wikipedia administrator.

Books

Highly cited articles