Thomas Fraser Pettigrew

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Department of Psychology

This study ( N = 770) explores in depth the construct of deprovincialization by both uniting and comparing two scales that assess its two facets: the Group Deprovincialization Scale (GDS; Martinovic & Verkuyten, 2013) and the Cultural Deprovincialization Scale (CDS, Boin et al., 2020). First, we tested the factorial structure of the construct throu...

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

Deprovincialization is a set of attitudes characterized by two sides: a nuanced and fresh perspective on the in‐group culture and an open and accepting attitude toward other groups. After reviewing early research and indirect tests of the construct, we focused our attention on research investigating these two sides of deprovincialization. Studies c...

A field study was conducted with majority and minority group members to test whether the effects of optimal contact conditions and of intergroup contact generalize across situations, and extend to the support of intergroup equality in terms of agreement with social policies benefitting the minority group. Participants were 163 Italian and 129 immig...

The struggle to end racial segregation in America’s public schools has been long and arduous. It was ostensibly won in the 1954 Brown v. Tulsa Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. But racist resistance has been intense. Years later, extensive school segregation remains for Black children. The High Court has essentially overturned Brown without...

Concerns about intergroup contact have a long and somewhat tortuous history. Shaped largely by Social Darwinism dogma, early theorizing anticipated negative effects. Following World War II, however, a more optimistic view took hold, and social psychological research began to study the phenomenon. Allport's (1954) influential book, the Nature of Pre...

Relative deprivation (RD) is the product of an upward comparison that indicates that one’s disadvantaged situation is undeserved coupled with anger and resentment. RD is associated with reduced psychological health and increased individual deviance and collective action. This chapter (a) reviews the history of RD to illustrate its value as a concep...

The roles of authoritarianism, social dominance orientation (SDO), and prejudice in the prediction of far‐right support were examined in Europe and the United States. A meta‐analysis shows remarkably similar, positive, and strong associations of far‐right support with these three variables in previous studies conducted in Europe, the United Kingdom...

Explaining negative attitudes towards immigration in general and threat due to immigration, in particular, has been a major topic of study in recent decades. While intergroup contact has received considerable attention in explaining ethnic threat, group relative deprivation (GRD), that is, feelings that one’s group is unfairly deprived of desirable...

Relative deprivation (RD) is the judgment that one or one’s ingroup is worse off compared with some relevant standard coupled with feelings of dissatisfaction, anger, and resentment. RD predicts a wide range of outcomes, but it is unclear whether this relationship is moderated by national cultural differences. Therefore, in the first study, we used...

Dr. King's 1967 speech was delivered at a tense time for both American race relations and social psychology. Race riots were widespread, the Civil Rights Movement was splintering, the Vietnam War was raging, and social psychology was engaged in a “crisis of relevance.” King listed a series of issues for the social sciences to address. Did we answer...

Social psychology experiences recurring so-called "crises." This article maintains that these episodes actually mark advances in the discipline; these "crises" have enhanced relevance and led to greater methodological and statistical sophistication. New statistical tools have allowed social psychologists to begin to achieve a major goal: placing ps...

Gordon Allport (1897–1967) was a leading personality and social psychologist of the mid‐twentieth century. Associated with Harvard University for half a century, he helped to establish personality as a major component of academic psychology with a classic 1937 book. Allport also advanced social psychology with another classic volume on intergroup p...

Based on two cross-sectional probability samples (Study 1: N = 1,382, Study 2: N = 1,587), we studied the interplay between positive and negative intergroup contact, different types of intergroup emotions (i.e., episodic intergroup emotions encountered during contact and more general chronic intergroup emotions), and outgroup behavior in the contex...

No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena can help to account for this extraordinary political event: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact. Research on the topic demonstrates that these the...

The single factor fallacy occurs when social scientists model their applied work largely around a single factor. The problem generally arises when either a highly relevant theory is ignored or when missing key variables distort the results. Examples of this fallacy are drawn from the expanding research literature on intergroup contact, where we dis...

The single factor fallacy occurs when social scientists model their applied work largely around a single factor. The problem generally arises when either a highly relevant theory is ignored or when missing key variables distort the results. Examples of this fallacy are drawn from the expanding research literature on intergroup contact, where we dis...

No one factor describes Trump's supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena - can help to account for this extraordinary political event: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact. Research on the topic demonstrates that these t...

Cites the factors underlying Trump's surprising election victory.

Racism is a doctrine that holds that the world’s human population consists of various “races” that are the primary determinants of human traits and capacities. This doctrine typically regards one’s own race as superior to other races. Intergroup hatred and discrimination generally accompanies racist doctrines. Social science investigates racism at...

The Nature of Prejudice ist wahrscheinlich eines der meist gelesenen Bücher in der Geschichte der Sozialpsychologie. Es wurde in viele Sprachen übersetzt. Als es erschien, beinhaltete es für die damalige Zeit drei wesentliche Neuerungen.

Intensive research throughout the world has led to the broadening of social science conceptions of both intergroup prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice is now seen as occurring at varying levels of depth. In fact, it can be so subtle that people are often unaware of their prejudices even though these attitudes influence their behavior. Situation...

Throughout my career, I have pursued three theories related to intergroup prejudice-each with a different mentor. Each theory and its supporting research help us to understand prejudice and ways to ameliorate the problem. This autobiographical review article summarizes some of the advances in these three areas during the past six decades. For autho...

Gordon Allport, a major American psychologist of the mid-twentieth century, made significant contributions to both personality and social psychology. His 1937 book, Personality, helped to establish personality as an essential component of academic psychology. His 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, became a classic in social psychology and shaped t...

Racial discrimination exists in straightforward actions but also in complex systems of social relations that produce racial inequities in social outcomes. Some analysts view all racial disparities as the result of discrimination; others restrict the concept to those acts intended to limit a group's resources. The first view is too broad, the second...

This paper first offers a tribute to Samuel Stouffer (1900-1960), a major contributor to social psychology. He helped to establish probability surveys as a useful method for social science, led three major studies at midcentury, and introduced important new concepts and statistical methods. Thus, both conceptually and methodologically, he shaped mo...

The focus of this special issue is relative deprivation (RD): the judgment that one or one’s group is worse off compared to some standard accompanied by feelings of anger and resentment. This collection of seven papers demonstrates the range of the new thinking and research about RD, and they include data from an impressive variety of participants—...

Relative deprivation (RD) is the product of an upward comparison that indicates that one's disadvantaged situation is undeserved coupled with anger and resentment. RD is associated with reduced psychological and physical health, individual deviance, and collective action, but empirical tests of RD are inconsistent. Closer attention to three central...

Dramatic forms of discrimination, such as lynching, property destruction, and hate crimes, are widely understood to be consequences of prejudicial hostility. This article focuses on what has heretofore been only an infrequent countertheme in scientific work on discrimination-that favoritism toward ingroups can be responsible for much discrimination...

Science and politics are complicatedly related. Here, we will analyse the relationship of social sciences and politics. We will confine ourselves to those cases where science is used to help politics to realise its goals. Adopting from Popper (1935) and Campbell (1969), we will describe a normative model of evidence based policies: PETER - a model...

This article memorializes M. Brewster Smith (1919-2012), one of the major champions of humanistic psychology. Smith served psychology in many capacities throughout his career. For the American Psychological Association (APA), not only was he the organization's president (1978-1979), as well as president of the American Psychological Foundation (198...

The effect of the intergroup climate on acculturation preferences among host-majority and immigrant group members has been long acknowledged in the acculturation literature. Only recently, however, research has started to directly examine the effect of the intergroup climate on acculturation preferences. In the present research, we aimed to contrib...

The effect of the intergroup climate on acculturation preferences among dominant and non-dominant group members has been long acknowledged in the acculturation literature. Only recently, however, research has started to directly examine the effect of the intergroup climate on acculturation preferences. In the present research, we aimed to contribut...

A number of cross-sectional studies have demonstrated a significant co-variation of patriotism and nationalism with prejudice against immigrants. This study examines the causal relationship between the three variables among 551 adult German respondents without migration background. Employing a longitudinal cross-lagged design with two measurements...

The histories of personality and social psychology have been closely intertwined for more than a century. But there have been several critical differences that have at times acted to separate the two fields. One such divergence involved their models of humans-whether largely irrational (the personality emphasis) or largely rational (the social emph...

Research and theory on intergroup contact have become one of the fastest advancing and most exciting fields in social psychology in recent years. The work is exciting because it combines basic social psychological concerns - human interaction, situational influences on behavior - with an effective means of improving intergroup relations at a time w...

Relative deprivation (RD) is the judgment that one is worse off compared to some standard accompanied by feelings of anger and resentment. Social scientists use RD to predict a wide range of significant outcome variables: collective action, individual achievement and deviance, intergroup attitudes, and physical and mental health. But the results ar...

Relative deprivation theory and research proposes that people use comparisons with other people, groups, or themselves at different points in time to evaluate their current circumstances. If these comparisons lead people to believe that they do not have what they deserve, they will be angry and resentful. Relative deprivation (RD) describes these s...

Thomas Pettigrew is Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Harvard PhD, he also taught at Harvard (1957–1980) and the University of Amsterdam (1986–1991). He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and has conducted inte...

This work identifies how cross-group friendships are conceptualized and measured in intergroup research, investigates which operationalizations yield the strongest effects on intergroup attitudes, explores potential moderators, and discusses the theoretical importance of the findings. Prior meta-analyses have provided initial evidence that cross-gr...

The theory of relative deprivation (RD) offers an instructive special case of Tajfel's CIC theory. Six focal issues characterize the current state of RD theory: (1) the egoistic–fraternalistic distinction, (2) measurement level, (3) the cognitive–affective distinction, (4) the absolute–relative distinction, (5) specification of the referent, and (6...

Recent advances in intergroup contact theory and research are reviewed. A meta-analysis with 515 studies and more than 250,000 subjects demonstrates that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice (mean r = −.21). Allport's original conditions for optimal contact – equal status, common goals, no intergroup competition, and authority sanction –...

Many problems confront psychological interventions for change. Some reside within the discipline (e.g., inexperience with policy development and the external validity issue). Other problems are raised by value issues and the controversial nature of policy debates that lie beyond the discipline. This article discusses these issues and then focuses o...

This review highlights the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)'s racial research contribution to public policy. Although not an initial focus of SPSSI, racial research has long been a central concern of the organization. Klineberg's work in the 1930s established an example of how social research could have widespread influe...

The authoritarian personality is a psychological syndrome characterized by deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups, and strict adherence to cultural conventions. Nazi Germany inspired the initial conceptualizations in the 1930s, and a 1950 US study established the theory in academic psychology. A variety of well-founded criticisms of th...

Five quite special features characterize Herbert Kelman and his work in social psychology: (a) his research is uniquely multilevel and contextualized; (b) there is a consistent moral dimension in all of his work and actions; (c) Kelman elicits trust from all sides; (d) he goes his own way independent of research fashions; and (e) he bravely bears t...

The articles in this issue provide an overview of recent research on intergroup relations in South Africa. Most of them focus on intergroup contact theory, and they replicate and advance the theory in a variety of ways. They also emphatically counter those critics who believe that the theory does not apply in parts of the world with long histories...

Evidence to support the argument that George Wallace's popularity is a product of rising antiblack sentiment is examined with a focus on the evaluation of Wallace by northern whites across a number of national surveys. Demographic characteristics of supporters are examined and the link between racial attitudes and pro-Wallace tendencies is explored...

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This article discusses six key issues that arise when social psychology applies its insights to international affairs. Three involve the applications themselves. Effective applications must connect with the macro level of analysis, attend to social problems long overlooked by the discipline, and operate consistently across cultures and societies. F...

Are small or large outgroup populations more closely related to an ingroup's prejudice? This paper addresses this question with national probability survey data from Germany focused on resident foreigners. Two interlocking processes underlie the complex relationship between population proportions and prejudice. Typically, larger outgroup population...

Does President Obama's momentous election victory signify a new, post-racism era in America? Many observers, such as a New York Times science editor, think so. But, unfortunately, this claim is premature for a host of reasons. [1] It took “a perfect storm” of interlocking factors to elect Obama. [2] Many bigots actually voted for Obama. [3] Two log...

The Question of Values in Social ResearchUpgrading our Methods Innovative Ideas in Social PsychologyThe Controversial Role of Relative DeprivationThe Importance of Intergroup ContactIntergroup Contact in ActionSumming UpA Final WordNotesReferences

This paper reviews the evidence for a secondary transfer effect of intergroup contact. Following a contact’s typical primary reduction in prejudice toward the outgroup involved in the contact, this effect involves a further, secondary reduction in prejudice toward noninvolved outgroups. Employing longitudinal German probability samples, we found th...

Recent years have witnessed a renewal of interest in intergroup contact theory. A meta-analysis of more than 500 studies established the theory's basic contention that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudices of many types. This paper addresses the issue of process: just how does contact diminish prejudice? We test meta-analytically the thre...

This article analyses the relationship of ethnic prejudice and discriminatory behavioral intentions in Germany. We utilize two representative surveys conducted in 2002 and 2004 (N= 2,722 and 1,383, respectively) as well as a longitudinal study with three annual measurement points (2002–2004; N= 825). Results show that prejudice is substantially cor...

Using three diverse European surveys, we test the relationship between relative deprivation (RD) and anti-immigrant prejudice. We find that both group relative deprivation (GRD) and individual relative deprivation (IRD) are found primarily among working-class respondents who are politically alienated. We also find that GRD, but not IRD, serves as a...

This article provides an introduction to research on European prejudice and discrimination. First, we list the distinctive characteristics of a European perspective and provide a short sketch of European immigration and ethnic groups. Europe has become a multicultural community. Nevertheless, public opinion and the continent's politics often do not...

Intergroup contact theory and research has received renewed interest in recent years. And this new work has led to rapid advances. This paper summarizes this progress and points to four future directions for further advances. (1) There is a continuing need to specify the processes of intergroup contact that explain its many effects. This is a call...

Six Examples of Major Policy InfluenceAreas of Policy InfluenceNine Difficult Issues Inherent in Influencing PolicyA Final WordReferences

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Racial oppression and conflict have remained a major concern of the USA throughout its history. Not surprisingly, then, ‘race relations’– as it is euphemistically termed – has been a focus of American social science since its origins in the late nineteenth century. This focus, however, has been uneven over the past century – often dim and reflectin...

The late Whitney Young Jr., former head of the National Urban League, often highlighted the significance of the conjunction but in White America's discourse on Black-White relations. "I support better race relations," goes a common refrain, "but you can't expect things to change overnight." In 2003, President Bush even celebrated Martin Luther King...

Defining prejudice Intergroup conflict is apparent throughout the globe today, fueled by prejudice and discrimination. But prejudice, like most human phenomena, is more complex than it first appears. For years, social psychology followed Gordon Allport's straightforward definition: intergroup prejudice consists of negative opinions against an outgr...