Research

My research examines how social and structural contexts shape intergroup perception, judgment, and discrimination. A central premise is that many forms of bias and inequality cannot be explained by individual attitudes alone. They may also arise through the interaction between psychological processes and the structural features of social environments. My work develops empirical approaches to study this interaction, combining experimental designs, field studies, multilevel methods, and secondary data analysis.

Two research lines define this program.

Context-Based Discrimination in Institutional Settings

Racialized disparities in institutional outcomes are well documented. Students from stigmatized groups are disciplined more frequently and more severely than their peers, even for comparable behavior. My research asks how this happens, and specifically, how features of the social environment contribute to this process.

Prior research has mostly treated school discipline as a dyadic event between a teacher and a student. Teachers, however, do not only interact with individual students. They act in classrooms with particular compositions, embedded in schools, nested in neighborhoods. My work develops and tests a model of how these contextual features shape teachers' perceptions and disciplinary responses, contributing to disparities that may emerge between school settings rather than only within them.

This program is supported by a DFG Emmy Noether grant and builds on earlier DFG-funded work. Preliminary work with pre-service and in-service teachers suggest that racialized classroom composition influences disciplinary decisions and perceptions of student behavior, even when the behavior itself is held constant across conditions.

Social Perception of Places and Neighborhoods

People perceive places as socially meaningful. Neighborhoods and urban spaces are stereotyped in ways tied to the groups associated with them, and these space-focused stereotypes may shape evaluations and institutional decisions.

This line of work examines the structure and content of space-focused stereotypes, particularly those tied to immigrant neighborhoods, and their consequences for judgment. One study collected data from 648 patrol officers in Hamburg, showing that officers' descriptions of their patrol areas were more negative in districts with higher shares of residents with a migration background — a pattern consistent with experimental findings from civilian samples. Related work examines how place-focused stereotypes figure in professional decision-making in social work services.

Methods and Open Science

Across both lines, I combine experimental methods with field studies and secondary data analysis. Experiments identify causal effects of contextual features. Field studies and large-scale datasets aim to establish generalizability and connect psychological processes to real-world patterns of inequality.

I share materials, data, and preregistrations where possible via the Open Science Framework.