Kristin Laurin
Biographic Data
| ID | 4101101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kristin Laurin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kristin |
| FAMILY NAME | Laurin |
| SIGNATURE | LAURIN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1126-5293 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 430 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Does Saying “Thanks a Lot” Make You Look Less Than? The Magnitude of Gratitude Shapes Perceptions of Relational Hierarchy
Gratitude expressions provide shared warmth benefits to both the thanker and the helper. Little work has explored how gratitude expressions shift how observers see these individuals on another important dimension: their relative rank. We consider how the magnitude of gratitude expressions shapes observers’ perceptions of the thanker’s and helper’s relative status and power. Seven studies find that thankers who expressed more, compared to less, in…
Trust and trust funds: How others’ childhood and current social class context influence trust behavior and expectations
Trust is vital for success in all kinds of social interactions. But how do people decide whether an individual can be trusted? One factor people may consider is that individual's social class. We hypothesize that people trust others from lower social class contexts more than others from higher class contexts; we also consider nuances between current and childhood class context and between trust as a behavior and trust as an expectation. Five prer…
Socioeconomic Status and Meta-Perceptions: How Markers of Culture and Rank Predict Beliefs About How Others See Us
How does a person’s socioeconomic status (SES) relate to how she thinks others see her? Seventeen studies (eight pre-registered; three reported in-text and 14 replications in supplemental online material [SOM], total N = 6,124) found that people with low SES believe others see them as colder and less competent than those with high SES. The SES difference in meta-perceptions was explained by people’s self-regard and self-presentation expectations.…
What will my life be like when I am 25? How do children's social class contexts predict their imagined and actual futures
Children use school as a way to imagine and strive toward their futures. We analyzed thousands of essays written by children in Britain in the late 1960s about what their lives would be like as adults. We used a bottom‐up approach to explore naturally occurring topics in these essays and tested how these topics varied with children's social class context and their adult outcomes. Higher education was the most prevalent topic in these children's e…
Is being elite the same as living an easy life? Two distinct ways of experiencing subjective socioeconomic status
3,338) to identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that factor into people's subjective SES. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that these experiences are best represented by two distinct dimensions-a sense that one belongs to a historical cultural elite (corresponding to SES as early life cultural context) and a sense that one's life is easy (corresponding, though less conclusively, to SES as current rank). We developed sc…
Is Religion Special
Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains via special mechanisms that are unlike secular mechanisms? These could include mechanisms such as b…
Do reminders of God increase willingness to take risks
Lower social class, better social skills? A registered report testing diverging predictions from the rank and cultural approaches to social class
Are people with lower socioeconomic status (SES) better than those with higher SES at empathic accuracy, or recognizing others' thoughts and feelings? Two psychological approaches to the study of SES say they are, but emphasize different reasons. The rank approach argues that because individuals with lower SES experience low rank, they feel less in control and more threatened by others, so it is more valuable for them to understand others' mental…
Assumptions About Algorithms’ Capacity for Discrimination
Although their implementation has inspired optimism in many domains, algorithms can both systematize discrimination and obscure its presence. In seven studies, we test the hypothesis that people instead tend to assume algorithms discriminate less than humans due to beliefs that algorithms tend to be both more accurate and less emotional evaluators. As a result of these assumptions, people are more interested in being evaluated by an algorithm whe…
Who would mourn democracy? Liberals might, but it depends on who’s in charge
Despite widespread support for the principles of democracy, democratic norms have been eroding globally for over a decade. We ask whether and how political ideology factors into people's reactions to democratic decline. We offer hypotheses derived from two theoretical lenses, one considering ideologically relevant dispositions and another considering ideologically relevant situations. Preregistered laboratory experiments combined with analyses of…
Being “good” or “good enough: Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard
This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their prosocial behavior legitimates the claim that they have acted morally, a claim that often diverges from whether their behavior is in the best interests of the recipient. Specifically, it predicts that for people to feel moral following a prosocial decision, that decision need not have promised the greatest benefit for the recipient but only one larger than at least one oth…
Probable Cause: The Influence of Prior Probabilities on Forecasts and Perceptions of Magnitude
Consumers' judgments of the magnitude of benefit that a product provides increase their likelihood of purchasing it, and their judgments of the magnitude of harm that accrues from purchasing a product decrease their likelihood of purchasing it. When assessing the magnitude of a product's potential outcome, consumers often encounter information about its probability of occurring. Ten studies demonstrate that this information biases consumers' prod…
Religion vs. the welfare state—the importance of cultural context for religious schematicity and priming
Prior research, using correlational and self-report methodologies, suggests that religion and public welfare function as alternate security/insurance systems. Consequently, in countries with more e
Hypocritical flip-flop, or courageous evolution? When leaders change their moral minds
How do audiences react to leaders who change their opinion after taking moral stances? We propose that people believe moral stances are stronger commitments, compared with pragmatic stances; we therefore explore whether and when audiences believe those commitments can be broken. We find that audiences believe moral commitments should not be broken, and thus that they deride as hypocritical leaders who claim a moral commitment and later change the…
When God's (not) needed: Spotlight on how belief in divine control influences goal commitment
Interventionist external agents make specific advice less demotivating
Who wants to get to the top? Class and lay theories about power
We investigated class-based differences in the propensity to seek positions of power. We first proposed that people's lay theories suggest that acquiring power requires playing politics-manipulating one's way through the social world, relying on a pragmatic and Machiavellian approach to impression management and social relationships to get ahead. Then, drawing on empirical work portraying individuals with relatively low social class as more stron…
Power and the pursuit of a partner’s goals
We investigated how power dynamics in close relationships influence the tendency to devote resources to the pursuit of goals valued by relationship partners, hypothesizing that low (vs. high) power in relationships would lead individuals to center their individual goal pursuit around the goals of their partners. We study 2 related phenomena: partner goal prioritization, whereby individuals pursue goals on behalf of their partners, and partner goa…
From fundamental motives to religious dimensions: Minding the gap
Johnson, Li, and Cohen offer a model that explains cultural and individual variations in religion as dynamic responses to fundamental evolved motivations. Here, I build on this model by considering
Religion and Punishment: Opposing Influences of Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy on Reactions to Unintentional Acts
We hypothesize that two distinct facets of religiosity—orthodoxy (an emphasis on belief) and orthopraxy (an emphasis on behavior)—predict differential sensitivity to an actor’s intent when making moral judgments. Participants judged actors who performed misdeeds intentionally or unintentionally. In Study 1, high orthopraxy predicted harsher judgments of the unintentional actor, while high orthodoxy predicted more lenient judgments. In Study 2, we…
A Relationship With God? Connecting with the Divine to Assuage Fears of Interpersonal Rejection
We examine the possibility that people can leverage their “relationship” with God as a stand-in for interpersonal relationships. More specifically, we hypothesize that people will seek closeness with the divine when facing the threat of interpersonal rejection and that conversely, they will seek interpersonal closeness when facing the threat of divine rejection. We test this idea across four studies. Along the way, we test additional predictions …
Stability and the justification of social inequality
Modern society is rife with inequality. People's interpretations of these inequalities, however, vary considerably: Different people can interpret, for example, the existing gender gap in wages as being the result of systemic discrimination, or as being the fair and natural result of genuine differences between men and women. Here, we examine one factor that may help explain differing interpretations of existing social inequalities: perceptions o…
Attachment and internalizing behavior in early childhood: A meta-analysis
Empirical research supporting the contention that insecure attachment is related to internalizing behaviors has been inconsistent. Across 60 studies including 5,236 families, we found a significant, small to medium effect size linking insecure attachment and internalizing behavior (observed d = .37, 95% CI [0.27, 0.46]; adjusted d = .19, 95% CI [0.09, 0.29]). Several moderator variables were associated with differences in effect size, including c…
Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation
Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omnipotent, controlling force and (b) an omniscient, all-knowing being. Given these 2 characteristic features, how might exposure to the concept of God influence behavior? Leveraging classic and rec…
Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs
Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness show…
God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems
The authors propose that the high levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and the defense of external systems, including increased beliefs in the existence of a controll…
Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be
How powerful is the status quo in determining people's social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in injunctification, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at least in part, by people's desire to justify their sociopolitical systems; and (c) that injunctifica…
Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs
Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness show…
On the belief in God: Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control
Attachment and internalizing behavior in early childhood: A meta-analysis
Empirical research supporting the contention that insecure attachment is related to internalizing behaviors has been inconsistent. Across 60 studies including 5,236 families, we found a significant, small to medium effect size linking insecure attachment and internalizing behavior (observed d = .37, 95% CI [0.27, 0.46]; adjusted d = .19, 95% CI [0.09, 0.29]). Several moderator variables were associated with differences in effect size, including c…
Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation
Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omnipotent, controlling force and (b) an omniscient, all-knowing being. Given these 2 characteristic features, how might exposure to the concept of God influence behavior? Leveraging classic and rec…
Who wants to get to the top? Class and lay theories about power
We investigated class-based differences in the propensity to seek positions of power. We first proposed that people's lay theories suggest that acquiring power requires playing politics-manipulating one's way through the social world, relying on a pragmatic and Machiavellian approach to impression management and social relationships to get ahead. Then, drawing on empirical work portraying individuals with relatively low social class as more stron…
Stability and the justification of social inequality
Modern society is rife with inequality. People's interpretations of these inequalities, however, vary considerably: Different people can interpret, for example, the existing gender gap in wages as being the result of systemic discrimination, or as being the fair and natural result of genuine differences between men and women. Here, we examine one factor that may help explain differing interpretations of existing social inequalities: perceptions o…
Hypocritical flip-flop, or courageous evolution? When leaders change their moral minds
How do audiences react to leaders who change their opinion after taking moral stances? We propose that people believe moral stances are stronger commitments, compared with pragmatic stances; we therefore explore whether and when audiences believe those commitments can be broken. We find that audiences believe moral commitments should not be broken, and thus that they deride as hypocritical leaders who claim a moral commitment and later change the…
Probable Cause: The Influence of Prior Probabilities on Forecasts and Perceptions of Magnitude
Consumers' judgments of the magnitude of benefit that a product provides increase their likelihood of purchasing it, and their judgments of the magnitude of harm that accrues from purchasing a product decrease their likelihood of purchasing it. When assessing the magnitude of a product's potential outcome, consumers often encounter information about its probability of occurring. Ten studies demonstrate that this information biases consumers' prod…
Power and the pursuit of a partner’s goals
We investigated how power dynamics in close relationships influence the tendency to devote resources to the pursuit of goals valued by relationship partners, hypothesizing that low (vs. high) power in relationships would lead individuals to center their individual goal pursuit around the goals of their partners. We study 2 related phenomena: partner goal prioritization, whereby individuals pursue goals on behalf of their partners, and partner goa…
When God's (not) needed: Spotlight on how belief in divine control influences goal commitment
What will my life be like when I am 25? How do children's social class contexts predict their imagined and actual futures
Children use school as a way to imagine and strive toward their futures. We analyzed thousands of essays written by children in Britain in the late 1960s about what their lives would be like as adults. We used a bottom‐up approach to explore naturally occurring topics in these essays and tested how these topics varied with children's social class context and their adult outcomes. Higher education was the most prevalent topic in these children's e…
Lower social class, better social skills? A registered report testing diverging predictions from the rank and cultural approaches to social class
Are people with lower socioeconomic status (SES) better than those with higher SES at empathic accuracy, or recognizing others' thoughts and feelings? Two psychological approaches to the study of SES say they are, but emphasize different reasons. The rank approach argues that because individuals with lower SES experience low rank, they feel less in control and more threatened by others, so it is more valuable for them to understand others' mental…
Being “good” or “good enough: Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard
This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their prosocial behavior legitimates the claim that they have acted morally, a claim that often diverges from whether their behavior is in the best interests of the recipient. Specifically, it predicts that for people to feel moral following a prosocial decision, that decision need not have promised the greatest benefit for the recipient but only one larger than at least one oth…
Birth cohort differences in cardiovascular risk factors in a Brazilian population of older elderly: The Bambuí cohort study of aging (1997 and 2008)
The aim of this study was to investigate whether cohort differences exist in the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors among older elderly from the Bambuí Cohort Study of Aging. Participants were those aged 71-81 years at two points in time a decade apart: 457 in 1997 (earlier cohort) and 553 in 2008 (recent cohort). The prevalence of hypertension (PR = 1.27; 95%CI: 1.19-1.36) and of diabetes mellitus (PR = 1.39; 95%CI: 1.06-1.83) was higher …
Is being elite the same as living an easy life? Two distinct ways of experiencing subjective socioeconomic status
3,338) to identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that factor into people's subjective SES. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that these experiences are best represented by two distinct dimensions-a sense that one belongs to a historical cultural elite (corresponding to SES as early life cultural context) and a sense that one's life is easy (corresponding, though less conclusively, to SES as current rank). We developed sc…
Interventionist external agents make specific advice less demotivating
God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems
The authors propose that the high levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and the defense of external systems, including increased beliefs in the existence of a controll…
On the belief in God: Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control
Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be
How powerful is the status quo in determining people's social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in injunctification, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at least in part, by people's desire to justify their sociopolitical systems; and (c) that injunctifica…
Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs
Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness show…
Birth cohort differences in cardiovascular risk factors in a Brazilian population of older elderly: The Bambuí cohort study of aging (1997 and 2008)
The aim of this study was to investigate whether cohort differences exist in the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors among older elderly from the Bambuí Cohort Study of Aging. Participants were those aged 71-81 years at two points in time a decade apart: 457 in 1997 (earlier cohort) and 553 in 2008 (recent cohort). The prevalence of hypertension (PR = 1.27; 95%CI: 1.19-1.36) and of diabetes mellitus (PR = 1.39; 95%CI: 1.06-1.83) was higher …
Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation
Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omnipotent, controlling force and (b) an omniscient, all-knowing being. Given these 2 characteristic features, how might exposure to the concept of God influence behavior? Leveraging classic and rec…
Stability and the justification of social inequality
Modern society is rife with inequality. People's interpretations of these inequalities, however, vary considerably: Different people can interpret, for example, the existing gender gap in wages as being the result of systemic discrimination, or as being the fair and natural result of genuine differences between men and women. Here, we examine one factor that may help explain differing interpretations of existing social inequalities: perceptions o…
Attachment and internalizing behavior in early childhood: A meta-analysis
Empirical research supporting the contention that insecure attachment is related to internalizing behaviors has been inconsistent. Across 60 studies including 5,236 families, we found a significant, small to medium effect size linking insecure attachment and internalizing behavior (observed d = .37, 95% CI [0.27, 0.46]; adjusted d = .19, 95% CI [0.09, 0.29]). Several moderator variables were associated with differences in effect size, including c…
Religion and Punishment: Opposing Influences of Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy on Reactions to Unintentional Acts
We hypothesize that two distinct facets of religiosity—orthodoxy (an emphasis on belief) and orthopraxy (an emphasis on behavior)—predict differential sensitivity to an actor’s intent when making moral judgments. Participants judged actors who performed misdeeds intentionally or unintentionally. In Study 1, high orthopraxy predicted harsher judgments of the unintentional actor, while high orthodoxy predicted more lenient judgments. In Study 2, we…
A Relationship With God? Connecting with the Divine to Assuage Fears of Interpersonal Rejection
We examine the possibility that people can leverage their “relationship” with God as a stand-in for interpersonal relationships. More specifically, we hypothesize that people will seek closeness with the divine when facing the threat of interpersonal rejection and that conversely, they will seek interpersonal closeness when facing the threat of divine rejection. We test this idea across four studies. Along the way, we test additional predictions …
From fundamental motives to religious dimensions: Minding the gap
Johnson, Li, and Cohen offer a model that explains cultural and individual variations in religion as dynamic responses to fundamental evolved motivations. Here, I build on this model by considering
Who wants to get to the top? Class and lay theories about power
We investigated class-based differences in the propensity to seek positions of power. We first proposed that people's lay theories suggest that acquiring power requires playing politics-manipulating one's way through the social world, relying on a pragmatic and Machiavellian approach to impression management and social relationships to get ahead. Then, drawing on empirical work portraying individuals with relatively low social class as more stron…
Power and the pursuit of a partner’s goals
We investigated how power dynamics in close relationships influence the tendency to devote resources to the pursuit of goals valued by relationship partners, hypothesizing that low (vs. high) power in relationships would lead individuals to center their individual goal pursuit around the goals of their partners. We study 2 related phenomena: partner goal prioritization, whereby individuals pursue goals on behalf of their partners, and partner goa…
Hypocritical flip-flop, or courageous evolution? When leaders change their moral minds
How do audiences react to leaders who change their opinion after taking moral stances? We propose that people believe moral stances are stronger commitments, compared with pragmatic stances; we therefore explore whether and when audiences believe those commitments can be broken. We find that audiences believe moral commitments should not be broken, and thus that they deride as hypocritical leaders who claim a moral commitment and later change the…
When God's (not) needed: Spotlight on how belief in divine control influences goal commitment
Interventionist external agents make specific advice less demotivating
Religion vs. the welfare state—the importance of cultural context for religious schematicity and priming
Prior research, using correlational and self-report methodologies, suggests that religion and public welfare function as alternate security/insurance systems. Consequently, in countries with more e
Being “good” or “good enough: Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard
This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their prosocial behavior legitimates the claim that they have acted morally, a claim that often diverges from whether their behavior is in the best interests of the recipient. Specifically, it predicts that for people to feel moral following a prosocial decision, that decision need not have promised the greatest benefit for the recipient but only one larger than at least one oth…
Probable Cause: The Influence of Prior Probabilities on Forecasts and Perceptions of Magnitude
Consumers' judgments of the magnitude of benefit that a product provides increase their likelihood of purchasing it, and their judgments of the magnitude of harm that accrues from purchasing a product decrease their likelihood of purchasing it. When assessing the magnitude of a product's potential outcome, consumers often encounter information about its probability of occurring. Ten studies demonstrate that this information biases consumers' prod…
Who would mourn democracy? Liberals might, but it depends on who’s in charge
Despite widespread support for the principles of democracy, democratic norms have been eroding globally for over a decade. We ask whether and how political ideology factors into people's reactions to democratic decline. We offer hypotheses derived from two theoretical lenses, one considering ideologically relevant dispositions and another considering ideologically relevant situations. Preregistered laboratory experiments combined with analyses of…
Assumptions About Algorithms’ Capacity for Discrimination
Although their implementation has inspired optimism in many domains, algorithms can both systematize discrimination and obscure its presence. In seven studies, we test the hypothesis that people instead tend to assume algorithms discriminate less than humans due to beliefs that algorithms tend to be both more accurate and less emotional evaluators. As a result of these assumptions, people are more interested in being evaluated by an algorithm whe…
Is Religion Special
Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains via special mechanisms that are unlike secular mechanisms? These could include mechanisms such as b…
Do reminders of God increase willingness to take risks
Lower social class, better social skills? A registered report testing diverging predictions from the rank and cultural approaches to social class
Are people with lower socioeconomic status (SES) better than those with higher SES at empathic accuracy, or recognizing others' thoughts and feelings? Two psychological approaches to the study of SES say they are, but emphasize different reasons. The rank approach argues that because individuals with lower SES experience low rank, they feel less in control and more threatened by others, so it is more valuable for them to understand others' mental…
Socioeconomic Status and Meta-Perceptions: How Markers of Culture and Rank Predict Beliefs About How Others See Us
How does a person’s socioeconomic status (SES) relate to how she thinks others see her? Seventeen studies (eight pre-registered; three reported in-text and 14 replications in supplemental online material [SOM], total N = 6,124) found that people with low SES believe others see them as colder and less competent than those with high SES. The SES difference in meta-perceptions was explained by people’s self-regard and self-presentation expectations.…
Psychology (29 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (11 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (10 works) · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion (10 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (10 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works)