Abstract
Where scholarship on U.S. race relations is the topic, the name Thomas Pettigrew is predictably front and center. This has been true since the early days of Tom’s 58-year-long career as a social psychologist who specializes in racial prejudice and intergroup relations.
Tom Pettigrew was born and raised in the American South. As a youth he witnessed racial discrimination close up. For a 1986 Psychology Today interview, Tom described a formative event that unfolded when he and his beloved African American caregiver Mildred Adams set out to the movies together to catch the new film of her favorite actor, Humphrey Bogart. The theater staff applied the “whites only” rule, and Mildred Adams was barred from entry. Though still a child, Tom railed against that injustice, refusing to enter himself. Such experiences in Tom’s youth engendered abhorrence of racial prejudice and discrimination that has fueled the sophisticated scholarship and energetic service of his adult years.
The University of Virginia is Tom’s undergraduate alma mater. For graduate study Harvard beckoned, and Tom earned his MA and PhD in social psychology there, benefitting from close association with Gordon Allport that lasted until Allport’s death in 1967. After a one-year appointment at the University of North Carolina, Tom returned to join the faculty at Harvard, where he served for the next twenty-three years. In 1980 he was lured to the West Coast, where he spent fourteen years as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and another twenty years and counting as a research professor. He is certainly “emeritus,” but the research professor title better represents the pace of his scholarly activity.
One measure of Tom Pettigrew’s accomplishments is the vast number of impressive and varied publications. His early books, A Profile of the Negro American (1964) and Racially Separate or Together? (1971) were staples of race relations scholarship four decades ago. How to Think Like a Social Scientist (1996) and When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact (2011, with Linda Tropp) have been in the more recent spotlight. His publications include more than a dozen other books and monographs.
Then there are articles in such outlets as American Sociological Review, The American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Public Opinion Quarterly, Sociology of Education, Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, British Journal of Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology, The Annual Review of Psychology, and The Annual Review of Sociology. Titles of his articles hint at the range of Tom Pettigrew’s journal contributions: “Personality and Socio-cultural Factors in Intergroup Attitudes: A Cross-national Comparison” in Journal of Conflict Resolution; “The Demography of Desegregation” in Journal of Social Issues; “Toward Sustainable Psychological Interventions for Change” in Peace and Conflict; “Prejudice and Minority Proportion: Contact Instead of Threat Effects” in Social Psychology Quarterly; “Who Opposes Immigration? Comparing German Results with those of North America” in Du Bois Review.
The preceding paragraphs detail only a sample of the innovative and influential scholarship authored by Tom Pettigrew, reported in literally hundreds of other publications—monographs, edited works, reports to official commissions, chapters, and articles. But such counts give only a one-dimensional view. Looking at major themes in Tom’s scholarly work provides a richer sense of who he is and what he has offered to social psychology and to the public.
In the 1950s when Tom Pettigrew’s career as a researcher began, the Freudian-influenced portrayal of race prejudice as one facet of an “authoritarian personality” was in its heyday. Tom’s research, conducted in the United States and South Africa, countered this perspective; it provided persuasive evidence that social norms rather than personality predispositions are pivotal in generating and sustaining racial prejudice and discrimination. This work propelled a shift in race relations scholarship, away from a focus on pathology in white individuals, toward a more sociological analysis. To this day, the first entry in Tom’s list of research interests is “social psychological and structural factors in intergroup relations.”
Tom Pettigrew’s use and development of the relative deprivation concept constitutes another longstanding strand of his work. His 1967 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation chapter, “Social Evaluation Theory: Convergences and Applications,” was called a landmark publication in the 2002 Relative Deprivation volume. The volume editors, Walker and Smith, say in the volume’s introduction that the chapter “provides testimony to Pettigrew’s lasting influence on the field.” Walker and Smith note the multidisciplinary character of Pettigrew’s 1967 piece, “drawing examples from theory and research in psychology, social psychology, sociology, education, economics, and political science . . . notable in its application of sometimes esoteric social scientific theory and research to significant social problems.” These editors conclude: “In many ways, Pettigrew’s chapter is a prototype of the sort of social psychology that significant pioneers of social psychology such as Kurt Lewin envisaged.” Tom’s 2014 Cooley-Mead address, reproduced in the following pages, focuses on the relative deprivation theory and research that has been such an important dimension of his work. Here he describes informative and provocative results of an extensive meta-analysis conducted in collaboration with his former student Heather Smith.
In a 1979 article Tom Pettigrew used attribution theory to describe white Americans’ racial perspectives, developing a concept he called “the ultimate attribution error.” Here and elsewhere the contribution of cognitive processes to intergroup relations is acknowledged in his writing, although he insists on the centrality of affect.
Tom’s early work in South Africa was only the beginning of his comparative research. Benefiting from a 1986–1991 appointment at the University of Amsterdam, he developed collaborative relationships with a number of Western European scholars. One outgrowth of that work was another set of insights about racial views—the conceptualization of “subtle” and “blatant” prejudice, which has become a core element of the literature on new forms of racism in America and Europe. More broadly, his analyses of race relations in the United States have been enriched by observations about intergroup relations elsewhere, and his American scholarship has proved most useful to scholars studying racial/ethnic discrimination and inequity in other societies.
The 1987 Journal of Social Issues article Pettigrew wrote with Joanne Martin, “Shaping the Organizational Context for Black American Inclusion,” drew on social psychology and sociology literatures to offer an encyclopedic analysis of challenges faced by African American pioneers in predominantly white job settings, along with potential strategies for meeting those challenges. This work was considered an essential source for students, scholars, and practitioners concerned with the economic progress of black Americans.
Tom’s most recent book, When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact (2011, with Linda Tropp), is an empirical compilation and theoretical synthesis of the voluminous contact literature, assessing the potential of contact to improve intergroup attitudes; describing factors that promote positive outcomes after intergroup contact; and outlining dynamics that may underlie such positive change. Pettigrew’s work on intergroup contact effects, born of his interest in reducing racial prejudice, broadened to become the primary touchstone for research on intergroup contact of many kinds, between straights and gays, between homeless and domiciled people, and on. Like the “Black American Inclusion” paper described in the preceding paragraph, the intergroup contact book is quintessentially Pettigrew, as it presents an impressive array of evidence which then serves to undergird prescriptions for reducing inequity and injustice.
Tom Pettigrew’s scholarship has provided a foundation for noteworthy service to the profession and the public. He served as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and chair of the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association. In the 1960s, he served on the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rights. In the 1970s he was on the Advisory Committee for the U.S. Office of Education’s Coleman Report, and the National Task Force on Desegregation Strategies of the U.S. Education Commission. In the 1980s, he was a member of the Committee on the Status of Black Americans, convened by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. And from 2003 to 2007 he served on the German Government Scientific Advisory Committee on Intercultural Conflicts and Social Integration. He served as Consultant to the U.S. Office of Education and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and to seven State Education Departments, from the far West, to the Midwest, to the deep South, to New England.
While pursuing his scholarly career and advising governmental agencies, Tom has been a tireless advocate for social justice. His intolerance of racial inequity has fueled not only his career-long study of prejudice and discrimination, but countless contributions in the public arena, providing courtroom testimony and leadership for progressive policy efforts. His scholarship and advocacy is acknowledged in the 2008 edited volume Improving Intergroup Relations: Building on the Legacy of Thomas F. Pettigrew.
Importantly, Pettigrew’s broad portrayals of race in America have served as cornerstones for the work of generations of younger scholars. He has been mentor and loyal supporter to many. For countless others who have never had the chance to meet him, his work has provided direction and inspiration.
Thomas Pettigrew was twice awarded the Gordon W. Allport Intergroup Relations Prize. He received the Kurt Lewin Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. More recently, the International Society of Political Psychology gave him their Harold Lasswell Lifetime Achievement Award. There are more—this scholar has not suffered from lack of honors. But Thomas Pettigrew is, after all, a sociological social psychologist. Thus it is most fitting that his work has been recognized by the American Sociological Association Section on Social Psychology with its Cooley-Mead Award.