Kristin Laurin
Research Area
Education
PhD, University of Waterloo, 2012
About
Kristin is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. She arrived at UBC after studying at McGill University and at the University of Waterloo, and as a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Teaching
Research
Dr. Laurin’s research investigates how people’s goals and motivations interact with their beliefs and ideologies – about politics, about religion, or about the nature of the world. For example, she asks questions like what motivates people to support the principle of democracy, even when doing so goes against their own interests? Or what do we do when we’ve done something that we know is wrong? Why is it that the social standing you’re born with is most likely the social standing you’ll die with? And how do people go about convincing themselves that the world they live in is fair?
Publications
Laurin, K., Engstrom, R., Schmader, T., Chua, K. Q., Klein, N., & Côté, S. (in press). Trust and trust funds: How others’childhood and current social class context influence trust behavior and expectations. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology.
Engstrom, H. R., Laurin, K., Zuroff, D. C., & Schmader, T. (2025). Do people lead men and women differently? Multimethod evidence that group gender affects leaders’ dominance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication.
Laurin, K., Guan, K. W., & Younge, A. (2025). Does saying “thanks a lot” make you look less than? The magnitude of gratitude shapes perceptions of relational hierarchy. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Laurin, K., & Chua, K. Q. (2025). Ideology, motivation, and consistency between beliefs and behaviors. In B. Gawronski(Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. (Vol 71)
Guan, K, Heltzel, G., & Laurin, K. (2025). Moral dimensions of political attitudes and behavior. In P. A. Robbins & B. F. Malle (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology (pp. 529-574). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laurin, K., Engstrom, H. R., & Huang, M. (2024). What will my life be like when I’m 25? How children’s social classcontexts predict their imagined and actual futures. Journal of Social Issues.
Heltzel, G., & Laurin, K. (2024). Why Twitter sometimes rewards what most people disapprove of: The case of cross-party political relations. Psychological Science, 35, 976-994.
Engstrom, H. R., & Laurin, K. (2024). Lower social class, better social skills? A registered report testing diverging predictions from the rank and cultural approaches to social class. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11, Article104577. [registered report]
Engstrom, H. R., Laurin, K., Kay, N. R., & Human, L. J. (2024). Socioeconomic status and meta-perceptions: How markers of culture and rank predict beliefs about how others see us. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 50, 1386-1407.
Laurin, K., Engstrom, H. R., Alic, A., & Tracy, J. L. (2024). Is being elite the same as living an easy life? Two distinct ways of experiencing subjective SES. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 127, 822-845.
White, C. J. M., Dean, C., & Laurin, K. (2024). Do reminders of God increase willingness to take risks? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [registered report]
This is a list of recent representative publications; for a full list see the lab website.
View Dr. Laurin’s Google Scholar profile.
Awards
- Killam Faculty Research Prize (2021)
- Killam Faculty Research Fellowship (2020)
- Society for Personality and Social Psychology SAGE Young Scholars Award (2018)
- Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award (2018)
- Association for Psychological Science Rising Star Award (2017)
- CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2017)
