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Friday 17. March 2017

Understanding Trump supporters: Thomas F. Pettigrew demonstrates how social psychology may help

In the latest issue of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP) Thomas F. Pettigrew took up a current topic: the social psychology of Trump supporters.

The internationally acclaimed expert on prejudice and racism argues that five major social psychological concepts can help in understanding the (unexpected) appeal of Donald Trump to American voters, namely authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact. And Pettigrew continues: »These social psychological factors are not unique to the United States«, but may be applied to Europe’s far-right-wing voters as well.

Pettigrew’s research focuses on racial prejudice and ethnic relations. Since his retirement in 1994 he is Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also taught at the Universities of North Carolina, Harvard, and Amsterdam. In 2008 Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, awarded him an honorary degree.

JSPP is published by PsychOpen, the European Open-Access Publishing Platform for Psychology operated by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID).

Read Pettigrew’s article in JSPP.

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