U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
Overview • Previous NCS Programs • NCS Scholar List • NCS Brochure • 2002-2003

Thomas Pettigrew

Research Professor
University of California, Santa Cruz Department of Psychology
A Two-Level Approach to Anti-Immigrant Prejudice and Discrimination: The European Case
United States

Thomas F. Pettigrew is Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Harvard University Ph.D., he also has taught at the Universities of North Carolina, Harvard, and Amsterdam. In 2001-2001, he was a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Pettigrew has specialized in intergroup relations throughout his career, and conducted intergroup research in Australia, Europe, and South Africa in addition to North America. He served as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and later received the Society's Gordon Allport Intergroup Research and Kurt Lewin Awards. The American Sociological Association gave him the Sydney Spivack Award for Race Relations Research. In 2002, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology presented him with its Distinguished Scientist Award.

Selected Publications:

How to Think Like a Social Scientist (1996).
The Sociology of Race Relations (1980).
Racial Discrimination in the U.S. (1975).
Racially Separate or Together (1971).
A Profile of the Negro American (1964).

A Two-Level Approach to Anti-Immigrant Prejudice and Discrimination: The European Case

Millions of immigrants have come to Western Europe during the last four decades. This massive movement to a continent more accustomed to out- than in-migration triggered a range of negative responses - from prejudice to open violence. Two distinct research literatures studying these phenomena have developed in the social sciences. One is largely social psychological and works at the individual and intergroup levels of analysis. It finds that anti-immigrant prejudice and discrimination closely resemble results involving non-immigrant target groups. A second research literature focuses on structural and cultural factors and reaches a different conclusion. Anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists demonstrate that resistance to immigrants often varies sharply across nations and presents contrasting patterns to those faced by native minorities.

This project aims to unite these two research traditions. Using European survey, structural, and cultural data, the research design envisages developing hierarchical and mediational models for a diversity of indicators of intergroup conflict. By combining the two approaches, these more robust models would allow a broader view of the European reception of immigrants. The new models should help to untangle theoretical discrepancies between the two research traditions as well as to isolate the factors that differentiate between low- and high-conflict areas. To achieve these goals, the continuation of my long-term collaboration with European colleagues is indispensable.

Thus, this research addresses the 2003 NCS theme to understand "sectarian, ethnic, and cultural conflict within and across borders" by attempting to develop " innovative, theoretical, conceptual and empirical comparative" models.