Thomas F. Pettigrew is Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 1956, he has published 400 articles, book chapters, and reviews in addition to sixteen books and monographs. Pettigrew is widely credited with keeping social psychology’s focus on intergroup contact over the past half-century. This research has focused on determining the critical links between the macro (cultural and structural), meso (situational), and micro (individual) levels of social science theory and research – with intergroup contact constituting one of these links. Pettigrew served as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and later received the Society’s Kurt Lewin and Distinguished Service Awards and twice its Gordon Allport Intergroup Research Award. In 2002, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology presented him with its Distinguished Scientist Award.
Linda R. Tropp is Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Concentration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her main research interests concern experiences with intergroup contact among members of minority and majority status groups, identification with social groups, interpretations of intergroup relationships, and responses to prejudice and disadvantage. She is a recipient of the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize for her research on intergroup contact, and she received the McKeachie Early Career Award for the teaching of psychology.
