Social Cognition

Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University (Ph.D., Harvard University; honorary doctorates, Universit Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands; Universitt Basel, Switzerland; Universidad de Granada, Spain). She attended Harvard/Radcliffe College, majoring in Social Relations, where she met her graduate advisor and lifelong collaborator, Shelley Taylor. After her doctorate in social psychology, she worked at Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before moving to Princeton in 2000.

She investigates social cognition, especially cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, and neural levels. Author of about 400 articles and chapters, she is most known for work on social cognition, 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, and the stereotype content model (SCM).

Her current SCM work focuses on the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition, perceived warmth (friendly, trustworthy) and perceived competence (capable, assertive). Upstream, perceived social structure predicts these stereotypes (cooperation-competition predicts warmth; status predicts competence). Downstream, specific emotions follow each warmth-x-competence quadrant (pride, disgust, envy, pity) and predict specific behaviors (active and passive help or harm). Using representative sample surveys, lab experiments, and neuro-imaging, Fiske lab has focused on varieties of dehumanization predicted by the SCM: 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. Current work uses natural language analyses to explore spontaneous descriptions of others. Adversarial collaborations on research and adversarial alignments on theory are current projects to advance her science.

The U.S. Supreme Court cited her gender-bias testimony, and she testified before President Clintons Race Initiative Advisory Board. These influenced her edited volume, Beyond Common Sense: Psychological Science in the Courtroom. Currently an editor of the Annual Review of Psychology, PNAS, Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Handbook of Social Psychology, she has written the upper-level texts Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology (4/e) and Social Cognitio...

Chapter 1: Introduction Part 1: Basic Concepts in Social Cognition Chapter 2: Dual Modes in Social Cognition Chapter 3: Attention and Encoding Chapter 4: Representation in Memory Part 2: Understanding Individual Selves and Others Chapter 5: Self in Social Cognition Chapter 6: Attribution Processes Chapter 7: Heuristics and Shortcuts: Efficiency in Inference and Decision Making Chapter 8: Accuracy and Efficiency in Social Inference Part 3: Making Sense of Society Chapter 9: Cognitive Structures of Attitudes Chapter 10: Cognitive Processing of Attitudes Chapter 11: Stereotyping: Cognition and Bias Chapter 12: Prejudice: Interplay of Cognitive and Affective Biases Part 4: Beyond Cognition: Affect and Behavior Chapter 13: From Social Cognition to Affect Chapter 14: From Affect to Social Cognition Chapter 15: Behavior and Cognition