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Contextual Social Psychology Reanalyzing Prejudice, Voting, and Intergroup Contact PDF Ebook With Full Chapters

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Contextual Social Psychology Reanalyzing Prejudice, Voting,

and Intergroup Contact

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oting-and-intergroup-contact/

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Copyright © 2021 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, including,
but not limited to, the process of scanning and digitization, or stored in a database or
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The opinions and statements published are the responsibility of the author, and such
opinions and statements do not necessarily represent the policies of the American
Psychological Association.

Published by
American Psychological Association
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Cover Designer: Beth Schlenoff Design, Bethesda, MD

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pettigrew, Thomas F., author.


Title: Contextual social psychology : reanalyzing prejudice, voting, and
intergroup contact / Thomas F. Pettigrew.
Description: Washington : American Psychological Association, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011354 (print) | LCCN 2020011355 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781433832949 (paperback) | ISBN 9781433833182 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social psychology--Research. | Intergroup relations. |
Voting. | Prejudices.
Classification: LCC HM1019 .P48 2020 (print) | LCC HM1019 (ebook) |
DDC 302—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011354
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011355

https://doi.org/10.1037/0000210-000

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I wish to dedicate this book to my late wife of 63 years, Ann Hallman Pettigrew,
BA, MD, MPH. While engaged in a long and distinguished career in pediatric
public health that actually saved children’s lives, Ann somehow managed
to listen patiently to and improve dozens of my speeches and edit virtually
all of my published writings. In the last month of her life, she urged me
to write this book.
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
1. A Personal Quest 9
2. What Is Contextual Social Psychology? 27
3. Five Advantages of Contextual Analyses for Social Psychology 37
4. Statistical Advances Enable and Encourage Contextual Analyses
in Social Psychology 63
5. Applying Contextual Analyses to Intergroup Prejudice 73
6. Applying Contextual Analyses to Relative Deprivation 109
7. Applying Contextual Analyses to Intergroup Contact 121
8. Applying Contextual Analyses to Far-Right Voting Patterns 157
9. Looking Ahead 183
References 191
Index 251
About the Author 271

vii
Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge my former doctoral students, colleagues, and friends


who helped me in many ways with the writing of this volume. They contrib-
uted many good ideas and references, but the remaining mistakes are my
responsibility. First, those who read early drafts and made exceedingly helpful
comments: Professor Ulrich Wagner of the Philipps University in Marburg,
Germany; Professor Howard Schuman of the University of Michigan; Professor
Norman Feather of the University of Flinders in Australia; Professor Heather
Smith of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California; Professor Linda
Tropp of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Professor Christian
Crandall of the University of Kansas; Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton Uni-
versity; Professor Craig Reineman of the University of California, Santa Cruz;
and three anonymous reviewers. I also thank Kristen Knight of the American
Psychological Association Press—an extremely helpful book editor.
Chapters 4 and 5 on statistics and prejudice were influenced heavily by my
work with Wagner and Oliver Christ of Fern University in Germany. Professor
David Kenny at the University of Connecticut, Professor Charles Judd of the
University of Colorado, and Professor Anthony Greenwald of the University of
Washington also supplied invaluable advice on these chapters. Chapter 6 on
relative deprivation was significantly shaped by my joint research and writing
over 3 decades with Heather Smith and Professor Ian Walker of the Australian
National University in Canberra, Australia. Chapter 7 on intergroup contact is
the latest statement growing out of a 2-decade-long collaboration with Tropp.

ix
x • Acknowledgments

In addition, Eric Uslaner, emeritus professor of political science at the Univer-


sity of Maryland, provided vital assistance on the issue of contact’s effects on
trust. Chapter 8 on right-wing voting was made possible by my partnership
with Jasper van Assche of Ghent University in Belgium and Professor Kristof
Dhont of Kent University of Canterbury in Great Britain.
My most sincere thanks to them all.
Contextual
Social
Psychology
INTRODUCTION

Once you become an octogenarian and have engaged in social psychological


research and writing for two thirds of a century, you must ask yourself just
what it all adds up to in the end. Were there central themes? Was there an
overarching perspective that developed over the years? What, if anything,
contributed to advances in my discipline of social psychology?
This volume provides my answers to these questions. I have consistently
tried, with varying success, to place the psychological characteristics of
individuals within their structural, cultural, and normative contexts. In other
words, I have long sought to help establish a contextual social psychology.
The idea of a contextual social psychology is simple, straightforward,
and hardly new. It simply means placing data from one level of analysis
within the context of other levels. In what was one of the very first studies
in North American social psychology, Norman Triplett (1898), an amateur
bicycle racer himself, keenly observed that riders tended to pump harder
and race faster when riding with others than when riding alone—a basic
contextual result.

https://doi.org/10.1037/0000210-001
Contextual Social Psychology: Reanalyzing Prejudice, Voting, and Intergroup Contact,
by T. F. Pettigrew
Copyright © 2021 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

3
4 • Contextual Social Psychology

But advancing the contextual idea is anything but simple. Indeed, social
science has wrestled with this problem both theoretically and methodolog-
ically throughout its history. This book illustrates how, over the years, slow
progress has been made in establishing a theoretically and methodo­
logically sound contextual approach in the discipline. Indeed, recent years
have witnessed major methodological and statistical advances that have
made contextual research far easier to conduct, more rigorous, and more
common. And it is this emergence of contextual research in social psychology
that this volume traces and describes, and for which it advocates. I have
attempted to write the book so that non–social scientists can easily follow
the argument. But it is aimed primarily at social scientists in general and at
advanced undergraduates and graduate students in psychology and sociology
who wish to learn about these contextual ideas and how they have histori-
cally developed.

BOOK SYNOPSIS

Let me first provide an outline of the book’s nine chapters so that the reader
understands how the book’s contentions unfold.

Chapter 1: A Personal Quest

My two thirds of a century of research and writing has been shaped by


a desire to see psychological social psychology become a more contextual
discipline. This chapter records aspects of my life that contributed to this
aspiration. With great good fortune, I benefited from instruction from
three inspiring Harvard University professors—Gordon Allport, Samuel
Stouffer and Talcott Parsons—as well as from two caring and candid African
Americans: Mildred Adams and Kenneth Clark. And my experiences in the
courtroom, on racial commissions, and advising school districts and other
organizations bolstered further my conviction that a multilevel, contextual
approach is essential.

Chapter 2: What Is Contextual Social Psychology?

Just as its name implies, contextual social psychology seeks to place basic
psychological phenomena in their social contexts. This procedure typically
involves more than one level of analysis. Figure 2.1 presents a simple diagram
Introduction • 5

involving three levels of analysis—the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels—


with six causal paths connecting them. The chapter provides examples, both
empirical and theoretical, to illustrate each path. This diagram is then used
throughout the volume.

Chapter 3: Five Advantages of Contextual Analyses for Social Psychology

This chapter answers the question “Why employ contextual analyses?” by


specifying five advantages of the approach.

1. Contextual analyses offer a rapprochement between social psychologists in


sociology and psychology, as well as with the other social sciences. Examples
show how other social sciences, especially political science and economics,
have benefited from borrowing social psychological ideas and how social
psychology could benefit from their ideas.

2. Contextual analyses avoid the compositional fallacy, the ecological fallacy,


and the single-factor fallacy. Each fallacy is described, and examples are
provided. This is an especially significant advantage because these fallacies
are surprisingly common in the social science literature and even more
common in popular discussion.

3. Contextual analyses importantly expand social psychology’s explanatory


power. Using the cognitive example of group attribution bias, this section
cites the numerous contextual factors that influence the bias.

4. Contextual analyses help to counter social psychology’s so-called crises. Over


the past half century, social psychology has experienced two self-inflicted
“crises.” The first was the crisis of relevance. During the 1960s, many
social psychologists worried that the discipline was drifting from its roots
as a change-oriented field. The second crisis is currently a crisis of method,
concentrating on “false positives” and replication failures. Both concerns
have been overblown, but this latest crisis has led to greater method-
ological and statistical rigor. Contextual analyses aid the corrections for
these related issues.

5. Contextual analyses generate results that more easily influence public


policy. Social policy largely operates at the macrolevel. Policymakers, who
are often lawyers, cannot easily use social science findings at micro-
and mesolevels, levels at which social psychologists typically work, but
contextual findings that use the macrolevel readily translate into policy
terms.
6 • Contextual Social Psychology

Chapter 4: Statistical Advances Enable and Encourage Contextual Analyses in


Social Psychology

This chapter traces the development over the past half century of advanced
statistics that both enabled and encouraged the use of contextual analyses.
First came structural equation modeling and related methods. Then Blalock
(1984) published his explicit analysis of contextual effects models. Next came
simple and direct methods for uncovering mediating and moderator effects.
Then meta-analysis offered a standardized and systematic method for com-
bining the results of multiple studies. Finally, multilevel analyses were intro-
duced—the most valuable method of all for contextual analyses. Indeed,
this volume describes one multilevel analysis study after another to establish
how important this statistical advance is for the contextual approach.

Chapter 5: Applying Contextual Analyses to Intergroup Prejudice

Chapters 5 through 8 demonstrate how predictors of an important phenom-


enon are found at the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels. Prejudice correlates at
the microlevel include authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, open-
ness to experience, agreeableness, need for closure, and deprovincializa-
tion; at the mesolevel, intergroup contact; and at the macrolevel, restrictions
on intergroup contact (e.g., segregation), discriminatory norms, and difficult
economic times.

Chapter 6: Applying Contextual Analyses to Relative Deprivation

Relative deprivation also has correlates at all three analysis levels. The micro­
level has political alienation and inefficacy, age, and education; the mesolevel
has differences in economic well-being in the immediate environment; and
the macrolevel has cultural and normative differences in individualism and
collectivism and has economic differences between nations.

Chapter 7: Applying Contextual Analyses to Intergroup Contact

Again, critical correlates of this central phenomenon emerge at all three


levels. The microlevel has the usual suspects—authoritarianism, social
dominance orientation, sensitivity to threats, empathy, perspective taking,
insecure attachment, and the Big Five traits of Agreeableness and Open-
ness to Experience. The mesolevel has prior intergroup experience, situa-
tional threat, equal-status and common goals of groups in the situation, and
Introduction • 7

intergroup cooperation. The macrolevel has cultural and normative differ-


ences in egalitarian values and authority support.

Chapter 8: Applying Contextual Analyses to Far-Right Voting Patterns

This chapter records the remarkable similarities at all three analysis levels
in extreme right-wing voting in the United States, the United Kingdom,
and continental Europe. At all levels, the predictors of voting for Trump
and other nationalists are much the same as those for positively predicting
prejudice and those negatively predicting intergroup contact. The micro­
level has authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, and
relative deprivation; the mesolevel has lack of intergroup contact; and the
macrolevel has the rapid recent arrival of immigrants in the area.

Chapter 9: Looking Ahead

The final chapter summarizes various implications of the contextual approach


for the teaching of social psychology at the graduate and undergraduate
levels, as well as the proposal for concepts that span all three levels of
analysis.
From this outline, we turn to the details of my long experience in the dis-
cipline that led me to become an ardent advocate of contextual analyses
of social psychological phenomena.

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