About

Nils Karl Reimer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. in Social Sciences from University College Maastricht in 2013, followed by an M.Sc. in Psychological Research and a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford in 2019. His academic journey includes working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford from 2019 to 2020 and at the University of Southern California from 2020 to 2022 before joining UCSB in 2022. Reimer's research employs advanced quantitative methods to explore intergroup relations, social identity, social injustice, and social change. His work investigates how intergroup contact influences prejudices, awareness of social injustice, and support for social change. He studies the effects of personal experiences with members of different social groups on attitudes and behaviors, including how intergroup contact can foster allyship or undermine support for social change in disadvantaged groups. His current and future research also examines double standards in social change efforts and defensive responses to confronting social injustice. His methodological approach includes Bayesian data analysis, multilevel models, structural equation models, meta-analysis, and social network analysis. Reimer's contributions have been recognized with awards such as the 2019 Early Career Award from the Social Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, and he has been involved in research initiatives like the Double-Standards In Collective Actions Research Program.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Sociology
• Political science

Selected publications

• The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus

  2026-04-30 · 23 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, environmental action, political engagement, and protest. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but achieving strong performance in such subjective tasks requires large, hand-annotated datasets. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable, and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 English Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We evaluate baselines using large language models (Llama3-8B, Ministral-8B) in zero-shot, few-shot, and PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) settings, comparing their performance to fine-tuned encoder-only models like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). The results show that LLMs continue to lag behind fine-tuned encoders on this subjective task, underscoring the ongoing need for human-annotated moral corpora for AI alignment evaluation. Keywords: moral sentiment annotation, moral values, moral foundations theory, multi-label text classification, large language models, benchmark dataset, evaluation and alignment resource

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Double standards in judging collective action.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2025-04-24 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  = 2,776), we found no consistent evidence for ingroup bias in terms of social class when judging protests for workers' rights (Experiment 1), in terms of race when judging protests for and against defunding the police (Experiment 2), and in terms of gender when judging protests for and against restricting abortion (Experiment 3). Instead, we found that progressive participants (Experiments 1-3) who rejected system-justifying beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2) considered the same protest actions more acceptable when a cause aligned with their ideological orientation (for workers' rights, for defunding the police, against restricting abortion) than when it did not (against defunding the police, for restricting abortion). Conservative participants considered the same actions somewhat more acceptable when protesters supported, rather than opposed, restricting abortion (Experiment 3) but considered all protest actions, for and against defunding the police, equally unacceptable (Experiment 2). Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding the often-divided response to social movements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Double standards in judging collective action

  2025-02-19 · 1 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Collective action is a powerful force driving social change but often sparks contention about what actions are acceptable means to effect social change. We investigated double standards in judging collective action—that is, whether observers judge the same protest actions to be more acceptable depending on who the protesters are and what they are protesting. In two studies, we used item response theory to develop an instrument of 25 controversial protest actions to measure where people draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of collective action. In three preregistered experiments (N = 2776), we found no consistent evidence for ingroup bias in terms of social class when judging protests for workers’ rights (Experiment 1), in terms of race when judging protests for and against defunding the police (Experiment 2), and in terms of gender when judging protests for and against restricting abortion (Experiment 3). Instead, we found that progressive participants (Experiments 1–3) who rejected system-justifying beliefs (Experiments 1–2) considered the same protest actions more acceptable when a cause aligned with their ideological orientation (for workers’ rights, for defunding the police, against restricting abortion) than when it did not (against defunding the police, for restricting abortion). Conservative participants considered the same actions somewhat more acceptable when protesters supported, rather than opposed, restricting abortion (Experiment 3) but considered all protest actions, for and against defunding the police, equally unacceptable (Experiment 2). Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding the often-divided response to social movements.

  PublisherDOI

• Targeting audiences’ moral values shapes misinformation sharing.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2025-01-13 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  = 20,235; 809,414 tweets) that explores how aligning the moral values of message senders with misinformation content influences its dissemination in the context of COVID-19 vaccination misinformation. First, we investigate how aligning messages' moral framing with participants' moral values impacts participants' intentions to share true and false news headlines and whether this effect is driven by a lack of analytical thinking. Our results show that framing a post such that it aligns with audiences' moral values leads to increased sharing intentions, independent of headline familiarity, and participants' political ideology but find no effect of analytical thinking. Furthermore, we find that moral alignment facilitates sharing misinformation more so than true information. Next, we use natural language processing to determine messages' moral framing and senders' political ideology. We find that an alignment of moral framing and ideology facilitates the spread of misinformation. Our findings suggest that (a) targeting audiences' core values can be used to influence the dissemination of (mis)information on social media platforms; (b) partisan divides in misinformation sharing can be, at least partially, explained through alignment between audiences' underlying moral values and moral framing that often accompanies content shared online; and (c) this effect is driven by motivational factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Double standards in judging collective action

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2024-11-05

  otherOpen access
  Publisher

• A systematic review of motivated system justification among youth

  Frontiers in Social Psychology · 2024-11-21 · 2 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Introduction Redressing social inequities requires people to fight for social change and upend the status quo. However, beliefs that the current state of affairs operates in a just and fair way, referred to as system justifying tendencies, stand as obstacles to social change. With this investigation, we asked if there is evidence to suggest that youth hold system justifying beliefs. Methods Using PRISMA guidelines for a systematic review, we identified studies that measured system justifying beliefs among children [ages 6-12] and adolescents [ages 13-18]. Results This review synthesizes evidence that, first, both cohorts of youth hold beliefs that the status quo operates in a just and fair manner and that, second, system justification theory and its predictions extend to youth demographics. We note antecedents to system justifying tendencies in youth including demographic and situational factors. Moreover, we find evidence of the palliative consequences of system justifying tendencies in youth. Discussion We offer recommendations for future research into system justification among youth demographics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The socialization of perceived discrimination in ethnic minority groups.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2023-06-20 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  = 5,866 ethnic minority group members) assessed participants' positive contact, friendships, and perceived discrimination and applied longitudinal and social network analyses to separate and simultaneously test contact, socialization, and selection processes. In contrast to previous studies, we found no evidence that contact with members of the advantaged outgroup precedes perceived discrimination. Instead, we found that friendships with members of the disadvantaged ingroup longitudinally predict perceived discrimination through the process of socialization-disadvantaged-group members' perceptions of discrimination became more similar to their ingroup friends' perceptions of discrimination over time. We conclude that perceptions of discrimination should be partly understood as a socialized belief about a shared reality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• The Between-Person and Within-Person Effects of Intergroup Contact on Outgroup Attitudes: A Multi-Context Examination

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2023-02-15 · 30 citations

  articleOpen access

  The extensive literature on the contact hypothesis reports a positive association between intergroup contact and outgroup attitudes, yet it remains unknown whether this association reflects within-person (i.e., situational changes within individuals) or between-person (i.e., stable differences between individuals) effects. To investigate this question, we applied (random-intercept) cross-lagged panel models in two studies featuring different samples, measurements, and contexts. We found longitudinal contact–attitude associations in cross-lagged panel models, which cannot differentiate within-person and between-person effects. In random-intercept cross-lagged panel models, we identified between-person effects but not within-person effects. These results conflict with the contact hypothesis, which assumes that contact leads to intra-individual attitude change. We further investigated whether between-person effects represent spurious correlations caused by potential confounders (demographic characteristics, personality, and intergroup ideologies), but found that this was not the case. Our findings highlight the need to further investigate within-person effects and potential explanations of between-person differences in contact and attitudes.

  PublisherDOI

• Targeting audiences’ moral values shapes misinformation sharing

  2023-05-12

  preprintOpen access

  Does aligning misinformation content with individuals’ core moral values facilitate its spread? We investigate this question in three behavioral experiments (N1a = 615; N1b = 505; N₂ = 533) that examine how the alignment of audience values and misinformation framing affects sharing behavior, in conjunction with analyzing real-world Twitter data (N = 20,235; 809,414 tweets) that explores how aligning the moral values of message senders with misinformation content influences its dissemination in the context of COVID-19 vaccination misinformation. First, we investigate how aligning messages’ moral framing with participants’ moral values impacts participants’ intentions to share true and false news headlines and whether this effect is driven by a lack of analytical thinking. Our results show that framing a post such that it aligns with audiences’ moral values leads to increased sharing intentions, independent of headline familiarity, and participants’ political ideology but find no effect of analytical thinking. Furthermore, we find that moral alignment facilitates sharing misinformation more so than true information. Next, we use natural language processing to determine messages’ moral framing and senders’ political ideology. We find that an alignment of moral framing and ideology facilitates the spread of misinformation. Our findings suggest that (a) targeting audiences’ core values can be used to influence the dissemination of (mis)information on social media platforms; (b) partisan divides in misinformation sharing can be, at least partially, explained through alignment between audiences’ underlying moral values and moral framing that often accompanies content shared online; and (c) this effect is driven by motivational factors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Double standards in judging collective action

  2022-09-13 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Collective action is a powerful force driving social change but often sparks contention about what actions are acceptable means to effect social change. We investigated double standards in judging collective action—that is, whether observers judge the same protest actions to be more acceptable depending on who the protesters are and what they are protesting. In two studies, we used item response theory to develop an instrument of 25 controversial protest actions to measure where people draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of collective action. In three preregistered experiments (N = 2776), we found no consistent evidence for ingroup bias in terms of social class when judging protests for workers’ rights (Experiment 1), in terms of race when judging protests for and against defunding the police (Experiment 2), and in terms of gender when judging protests for and against restricting abortion (Experiment 3). Instead, we found that progressive participants (Experiments 1–3) who rejected system-justifying beliefs (Experiments 1–2) considered the same protest actions more acceptable when a cause aligned with their ideological orientation (for workers’ rights, for defunding the police, against restricting abortion) than when it did not (against defunding the police, for restricting abortion). Conservative participants considered the same actions somewhat more acceptable when protesters supported, rather than opposed, restricting abortion (Experiment 3) but considered all protest actions, for and against defunding the police, equally unacceptable (Experiment 2). Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding the often-divided response to social movements.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ralf Wölfer

  University of Oxford

  23 shared

• Nikhil K. Sengupta

  University of Kent

  19 shared

• Miles Hewstone

  University of Oxford

  18 shared

• Chris G. Sibley

  17 shared

• Fiona Kate Barlow

  University of Queensland

  16 shared

• Katharina Schmid

  Universitat Ramon Llull

  7 shared

• Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi

  University of Southern California

  7 shared

• Morteza Dehghani

  7 shared

Labs

• Social Injustice and Social Change LabPI

Education

• DPhil in Experimental Psychology, Department of Experimental Psychology

  University of Oxford

  2019

• MSc in Psychological Research, Department of Experimental Psychology

  University of Oxford

  2014

• BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences (Social Sciences)

  University College Maastricht

  2013

Awards & honors

• 2019 Early Career Award from the Social Psychology Section o…
• 2024 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize