[2] Pettigrew was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1931 during a period of racial segregation and intense prejudice in the American South.
As a youth, Pettigrew witnessed racial injustice first hand, such as a formative experience when he was accompanying his African American caregiver, Mildred Adams to movie starring Humphrey Bogart, her favorite actor.
[4] Pettigrew taught at Harvard for 23 years and in 1980 became a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
[3] Pettigrew's initial research showed that psychological factors such as orientation towards authoritarianism could not alone account for greater hostility towards Black Americans in the South.
The case of prejudice for example requires: Pettigrew has studied each level and its interactions with others throughout his career, such as the role authoritarianism plays with prejudice, subtle individual prejudicial attitudes affect the undermining of desegregation, or friendship plays in his reformulation of intergroup conflict and contact theory.