Professor Kraut has broad interests in the design and social impact of computing and has conducted empirical research on online communities, the social impact of the internet on personal relationships and psychological well-being, the design of information technology for small-group intellectual work, the communication needs of collaborating scientists, the impact of business computer technologies on organizational networks, employment quality, and home-based employment. He is a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and in 2016 won the ACM SigCHI Lifetime Achievement in Research Award.

His recent research has focused on the analysis and design of online communities, such as health-support communities, Facebook groups, Wikipedia projects, and guilds in multi-player games. This research consists of both empirical analyses of how they operate, such as how they socialize newcomers and they coordinate their work, and interventions to improve their operation. He is the coauthor of Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, a handbook published by MIT Press. He also has long standing research interests in understanding the relationship between psychological well-being and the use of the internet and social media.

He is a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and won the ACM’s SigCHI’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Research in 2016 and his paper on informal communication and scientific research won the ACM CSCW Lasting Impact Award in 2022 . He wrote a biographical essay, Re-engineering social encounters, in 2003 for the American Psychological Association. In 1980, his research on the evolution of the human facial expressions earned a Proxmire Golden Fleece “award”. His biographical essay, Why bowlers smile, and Ed Diener’s companion essay, Why Robert Kraut smiles, describe the legacy of that award. CMU’s School of Computer Science alumni magazine published an article describing his role in the formation of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Ben Schneiderman wrote an essay about Professor Kraut in his book Encounters with HCI Pioneers. 

Vita (updated December, 2023) 

Why Robert Kraut Smiles

“Kraut’s studies yielded an Important insight into the true genesis of smIling, and provided a foundation for later research, both in the laboratory and the field, that provided increased understanding of how people communicate through facial expressions.”

– Diener, E. (2006). Why Robert Kraut smiles. APS Observer, 19(6), 15, 32.