Tom Nijs is a Postdoctoral researcher at the European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) and the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). He studies how members of different ethnic groups view and think about each other. His research interests include interethnic attitudes, ethnic identification, intergroup contact, ownership beliefs, and radical right-wing voting.

In his current Postdoc project, he examines how people view the ethnicity and friendship relations of those in their social surroundings. He specifically focuses on how people view dual identifiers (who identify with both their ethnic and the national group, such as Turkish-Dutch).

Tom defended his PhD thesis entitled ‘This place is ours: Collective psychological ownership and its social consequences’ in April 2022. In his thesis he showed that a sense of ownership over territory (for example, a feeling that ‘this country is ours’) is accompanied by an exclusive right to determine what happens with the territory and that it can therefore lead to the exclusion of outsiders (such as immigrants). At the same time, as ownership also comes with a responsibility to take care of what is owned, collective psychological ownership can also lead to prosocial behavior to invest into the territory.