Using vivid examples of both historical and current events, acclaimed scholar Thomas Pettigrew’s compelling book advocates for a robust contextual social psychology, maintaining that far more attention should be paid to the social context of various phenomena relevant in the world today.

The volume traces the author’s 65-year career, and offers a contextual, three-level approach for studying and theorizing about a variety of social psychological phenomena, combining cultural, situational, and personality levels of analysis.

Each chapter illustrates concepts important to the field and provides insight into its advantages, applying these analyses to critical topics such as prejudice, far-right voting patterns, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact. The book describes milestones in establishing a theoretically and methodologically sound contextual approach, including major statistical advances that have made this research easier to conduct, more rigorous, and more commonplace.

As the book demonstrates, in an educational capacity, contextual social psychology opens the possibility for joint undergraduate and graduate courses with other social science classes, such as sociology and political science. Pettigrew paints a broad picture of how social science truly operates at multiple levels.