Susan T. Fiske

Biosketch

Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs, at Princeton University (Harvard University PhD; honorary doctorates: Université catholique de Louvain-la-neuve, Universiteit Leiden, Universität Basel, Universidad de Granada). She has investigated social cognition, especially cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, neuroscience, and formal levels. Primarily, she is known for the Stereotype Content Model, Ambivalent Sexism Theory, and the Power as Control Theory. Author of about 400 publications, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With Taylor, she wrote a classic graduate text, Social Cognition, which won the 2020 BBVA Frontiers of Science Award. Sponsored by a Guggenheim, her Russell-Sage-Foundation book is Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us. Her trade book is The HUMAN Brand: How We Respond to People, Products, and Companies (with Malone). She also authored several editions of an advanced undergraduate text, Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology. Her edited volumes address social cognition, nuclear war, racism, sexism, classism, migration, social neuroscience, psychology in court, research ethics, and science making a difference. She edits Annual Review of Psychology, Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and PNAS.

Research Interests

Fiske investigates social cognition, especially cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, and neuro-scientific levels. She is most known for theories and research on how people think about each other: the continuum model of impression formation, the power-as-control theory, the ambivalent sexism theory, prescriptive ageism, and the stereotype content model (SCM). Current SCM work focuses on the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition: other people's apparent warmth/trustworthiness and competence. People use social structure to infer these dimensions (cooperation-competition predicts warmth; status predicts competence). Distinct emotions (pride, disgust, envy, pity) reflect each warmth-x-competence quadrant. Specific behaviors (active and passive help or harm) follow. Her lab currently focuses on SCM's varieties of prejudices: dehumanizing allegedly disgusting homeless people, Schadenfreude toward the enviable rich, as well as paternalistic pity and prescriptive prejudices toward older people, disabled people, and women in traditional roles. Applying the SCM is her just-published The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies (with Chris Malone, 2013). Focused on social comparison is Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us (2011). With Shelley Taylor, she wrote a classic text: Social Cognition (2013, 4/e) and solo, Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology (2013, 3/e). She edited the Handbook of Social Psychology (2010, 5/e), Social Neuroscience (2011), the Sage Handbook of Social Cognition (2012), Beyond Common Sense: Psychological Science in the Courtroom (2008), and Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction (2012).