Susan Fiske

Her mother, Barbara Page Fiske (1917–2007), was a civic leader in Chicago.

Her brother, Alan Page Fiske, is an anthropologist at UCLA.

Fiske's grandmother and great grandmother were suffragettes.

Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University.

She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice.

Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University.

Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.

Fiske comes from a family of psychologists and social activists.

Her father, Donald W. Fiske, was an influential psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago.

In 1973, Susan Fiske enrolled at Radcliffe College for her undergraduate degree in social relations, where she graduated magna cum laude.

She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1978, for her thesis titled Attention and the Weighting of Behavior in Person Perception.

She currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband Douglas Massey, a Princeton sociologist.

The last semester of Fiske's senior year, she worked with Shelley Taylor, an assistant professor at Harvard, studying social cognition, particularly the effect attention has in social situations.

After graduation, Fiske continued in the field of social cognition.

There is conflict between the fields of social psychology and cognitive psychology, and some researchers want to keep these two fields separate.

Fiske felt that significant knowledge could be attained by combining the fields.

Fiske's experience with this conflict and her interest in the field of social cognition resulted in Fiske's and Taylor's book Social Cognition.

This book provides an overview of the developing theories and concepts emerging in the field of social cognition, while explaining the use cognitive processes to understand social situations, ourselves and others.

Fiske and Steven Neuberg went on to develop the first dual process model of social cognition, the "continuum model."

She gave expert testimony in the landmark case, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins which was eventually heard by the Supreme Court of the United States, making her the first social psychologist to testify in a gender discrimination case.

This testimony led to a continuing interest in the use of psychological science in legal contexts.

Working with Peter Glick, Fiske analyzed the dependence of male-female interactions, leading to the development of ambivalent sexism theory.

She also examined gender differences in social psychologists' publication rates and citations within the influential psychology journal, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The male authors in the sample submitted more articles and had higher acceptance rates (18% vs. 14%).

Women's impact was the same as men's as measured through the number of citations in textbooks and handbooks, so women were more cited per article published.

Fiske worked with Peter Glick and Amy Cuddy to develop the Stereotype Content Model.

This model explains that warmth and competence differentiate out group stereotypes.

Fiske has been involved in the field of social cognitive neuroscience.

This field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception.

Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping, intergroup hostility, and impression formation.

She has authored over 300 publications and has written several books, including her 2010 work Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology and Social Cognition, a graduate level text that defined the now-popular subfield of social cognition.

She has edited the Annual Review of Psychology (with Daniel Schacter and Shelley Taylor) and the Handbook of Social Psychology (with Daniel Gilbert and the late Gardner Lindzey).

Other books include Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us, which describes how people constantly compare themselves to others, with toxic effects on their relationships at home, at work, in school, and in the world, and The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies.

Her four most well-known contributions to the field of psychology are the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, the continuum model of impression formation, and the power-as-control theory.

She is also known for the term cognitive miser, coined with her graduate adviser Shelley E. Taylor, referring to individuals' tendencies to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics.

The stereotype content model (SCM) is a psychological theory arguing that people tend to perceive social groups along two fundamental dimensions: warmth and competence.

Warmth describes the group's perceived intent (friendly and trustworthy or not); competence describes their perceived ability to act on their intent.

The SCM was originally developed to understand the social classification of groups within the population of the U.S. However, the SCM has since been applied to analyzing social classes and structures across countries and history.

Most samples view their own middle class as both warm and competent, but they view refugees, homeless people, and undocumented immigrants as neither warm nor competent.

The SCM's innovation is identifying mixed stereotypes—high on competence but low on warmth (e.g., rich people) or high on warmth but low on competence (e.g., elderly people).

Nations with higher income inequality tend to use these mixed stereotypes more frequently.