Shana Levin Honored For Intergroup Relations Paper

Shana Levin, assistant professor of psychology, received an award on July 24 from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, an international association of psychologists, scientists and students based in Washington, D.C. She collaborated with five other researchers on a paper which received honorable mention for the SPSSI's 2001-02 Gordon Allport Award, recognizing research and scholarship on intergroup relations.
In their paper, Perceiving Personal Discrimination: The Role of Group Status and Legitimizing Ideology, Levin's group analyzed general principles about discrimination based on the status of one's group.
"People can be discriminated against because of a variety of different group memberships; for example, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status," she explained. "We examined perceptions of discrimination among members of different high status and low status groups, and found similar processes at work regardless of whether the discrimination was based on ethnicity or gender."
In March 2002, the award-winning article appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a monthly publication sponsored by the American Psychological Association.
Levin's co-authors are: Brenda Major and Shannon McCoy of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Richard Gramzow of Northeastern University; Toni Schmader of the University of Arizona; and Jim Sidanius of the University of California, Los Angeles. The researchers began the project in 1997, pooling resources to create an ad hoc think tank about intergroup relations. As a result, Levin said, "The paper was a combination of survey research and laboratory experimentation."
Levin's related article, Perceived Discrimination in the Context of Multiple Group Memberships, will be published in the Psychological Science journal in November.
Levin, who joined CMC in 1998, received a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley and master's and doctorate degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. After completing a pre-doctoral fellowship at Hebrew University, Israel, she served as an instructor and postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and wrote her dissertation on intergroup attitudes in the United States and Israel.
At CMC, she most recently taught political psychology, social psychology, statistics for psychologists, and a seminar in prejudice and intergroup relations.