Thomas F. Pettigrew

Thomas Fraser Pettigrew is an American social psychologist, born on March 14, 1931 in Richmond, Virginia, who is known for research on American civil rights and as one of the leading experts on the social science of race and ethnic relations. Growing up in the segregated South, he saw racial exclusion first hand, an experience that shaped his lifelong interest in prejudice. He took his bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Virginia and his master's degree and PhD in social psychology at Harvard University, finishing the doctorate in 1956, with Gordon Allport and Samuel A. Stouffer as his mentors. He taught at Harvard for 23 years and in 1980 became a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His central method is a multilevel approach to social issues: he argued that prejudice cannot be explained by individual psychology such as authoritarianism alone, and that the micro level of attitudes and personality, the meso level of the immediate social situation, and the macro level of social norms and structures must all be studied together. He also reworked intergroup contact theory with attention to the role of friendship.