With his co-authors, PBS Assistant Professor Nils Reimer was honored with the 2024 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize for their journal article on The Socialization of Perceived Discrimination in Ethnic Minority Groups published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize honors the memory of the late Gordon W. Allport, a founder and past president of APA Division 9, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). The award is given to "the best paper or article of the year on intergroup relations"—a field about which Allport cared deeply. Papers are selected based on the originality of their theoretical and empirical contributions.

Bracegirdle, Reimer, et al. (2023) argue that while discrimination against ethnic minorities is ubiquitous, perceiving discrimination against one's social group requires a further subjective judgment and is, in part, a socialized belief about a shared reality. This research uses data on the friendship networks of adolescents from ethnic minority groups to show that, over time, adolescents' beliefs about discrimination became more similar to those of their ingroup friends—that is, their peers from the same ethnic minority group. This finding corrects earlier claims that perceived discrimination is shaped by relationships with peers from the advantaged majority group.

This research builds on the methods and ideas developed by Dr. Reimer's then doctoral student Chloe Bracegirdle. Dr. Chloe Bracegirdle, who also led the award-winning research, is now a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology and a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Bracegirdle, C., Reimer, N. K., Osborne, D., Sibley, C. G., Wölfer, R., & Sengupta, N. K. (2023). The socialization of perceived discrimination in ethnic minority groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(3), 571–589. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000426