July 2003
Volume 16, Number 7
Robert Kraut is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Social Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in social psychology from Yale University in 1973. He conducts research on the design and impact of computer-mediated communication systems. More information is available at www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut.
I am a social psychologist with a joint appointment in the school of computer science and the business school at Carnegie Mellon University, where I teach and conduct research on the design of computer systems to support human communication and the impact these systems have on the individuals, groups, and organizations that use them. I started my career as a conventional experimental social psychologist. The PhD program at Yale provided rigorous research training and immersion in both classical theory and the cognitive revolution, which was then sweeping social psychology. It instilled in me a standard for empirical research by which I still judge my own work.
Although I found experimental social psychology intellectually exciting, for me, it was the excitement associated with chess - rigorous and demanding, but having limited validity outside the game itself. The goals of the social psychology game, as I understood them then, were to conduct rigorous research, based on discipline-sanctioned methods, in order to answer research questions, whose importance was determined by a consensus of other social psychologists. I was uncomfortable with this self-referential value system, and described my concerns in an essay titled "Social Psychology as Science Fiction," which I wrote at the end of graduate school. My advisor, Bob Abelson, however, wisely recommended I the bury piece, and nothing but the title remains.
I've been interested in applied problems since graduate school, where my first papers were on the development of political activism and deviant behavior. Most of the psychological research questions I thought important seemed to required knowledge and methods from other disciplines as well. I have been fortunate that my academic appointments have been all been interdisciplinary - the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania, a joint appointment in psychology and sociology at Cornell, and my current position at Carnegie Mellon University. Interdisciplinary programs in academia expand the knowledge base and tools available to answer research questions. At Carnegie Mellon, for example, I have been able to collaborate with computer scientists, who bring new tools for measuring human behavior over long time periods (Kraut, Scherlis, Mukhopadhyay, Manning, & Kiesler, 1996). I have also collaborated with economists, who contribute econometric techniques for analyzing time-series data (e.g., Kraut, Mukhopadhyay, Szczypula, Kiesler, & Scherlis, 1999) and formal modeling as a way to express theory (e.g., Kraut et al., 2002).
In addition to these academic appointments, I have also worked as a researcher in industry, at Bell Laboratories and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). Industrial research shifts one's focus from a discipline (or even multiple disciplines) to problems. Indeed, at Bellcore, experimental and social psychologists, sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, communication scholars, and computer scientists collectively comprised the weekly, brown-bag "psychology lunch." In this environment, being a psychologist was less a matter of pedigree and more a matter of being concerned with designing technology based on human needs.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of working in an interdisciplinary environment with computer scientists and engineers is that one need not take for granted the environmental constraints under which most social behavior occurs. By adopting an engineering mindset that one can decompose and reassemble reality, researchers are encouraged to rethink aspects of reality that psychology often takes for granted. For example, psychologists have long documented the influence of physical proximity between individuals on social outcomes ranging from the efficiency of referential communication in dyads (Clark & Brennan, 1991), to the likelihood of friendships (Newcomb, 1961), to success of group work (Allen, 1966). In most of this research, physical space is treated an undifferentiated whole. The challenge of designing, socio-technical systems, such as communication systems for distributed groups performing physical tasks, has challenged me to better understand which features of physical space and the face-to-face interaction it enables are essential to successful group work and which are epiphenomena (Kraut, Fussell, & Siegel, in press). I have also been able to work with engineers, computer scientists and other psychologists to develop communication systems to support group work at a distance (Fish, Kraut, Root, & Rice, 1993).
REFERENCES
Allen, T. (1966). Managing the flow of scientific and technological information. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Clark, H., & Brennan, S. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. Resnick & J. Levine & S. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127-149). Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Fish, R. S., Kraut, R. E., Root, R. W., & Rice, R. (1993). Evaluating video as a technology for informal communication. Communications of the ACM, 36(1), 48-61.
Kraut, R. E., Fussell, S. R., & Siegel, J. (in press). Visual information as a conversational resource in collaborative physical tasks. Human-Computer Interaction.
Kraut, R. E., Mukhopadhyay, T., Szczypula, J., Kiesler, S., & Scherlis, W. (1999). Communication and Information: Alternative Uses of the Internet in Households. Information Systems Research, 10(4), 287-303.
Kraut, R. E., Scherlis, W., Mukhopadhyay, T., Manning, J., & Kiesler, S. (1996). HomeNet: A field trial of residential internet services. Communications of the ACM.
Kraut, R. E., Sunder, S., Morris, J., Telang, R., Filer, D., & Cronin, M. (2002). Markets for Attention: Will Postage for Email Help? Proceedings, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: Association of Computing Machinery.
Newcomb, T. (1961). The acquaintance process. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
