Alan Fiske

Last updated
Alan Fiske
Born
Alan Page Fiske

1947 (age 7576)
Nationality American
Alma mater Harvard University (BA)
University of Chicago (MA, PhD)
Known forSocial relationship theories
Scientific career
Fields Anthropology
Institutions University of California, Los Angeles
Thesis Making Up Society: Four Models for Constructing Social Relations Among the Moose of Burkina Faso (1985)

Alan Page Fiske (born 1947) is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for studying the nature of human relationships and cross-cultural variations between them. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Fiske was born in 1947. His father, Donald W. Fiske, was a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. [2] His sister, Susan Fiske, is a social psychologist and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at the Princeton University Department of Psychology. [3]

Fiske earned a bachelor's degree (Cum Laude) in Social Relations from Harvard College in 1968. He went on to earn a master's degree in 1973 and a PhD in 1985, both from the University of Chicago, focusing on cross-cultural problems and human development. [4]

Career

Between earning degrees, Fiske worked as a director and consultant to the Peace Corps in Bangladesh and Upper Volta, and as consultant to USAID for the Central African Republic. [4]

Fiske held various professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, UCSD, Swarthmore College, and Bryn Mawr College, before obtaining a full professorship at UCLA in 2002. There he is former director of the Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, and of the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. [4] His areas of research interest include psychological anthropology, social relationships, and theories of violence. [5] Fiske is the author of Relational Models Theory [6] and, with Tage Rai, the author of Virtuous Violence Theory - the idea that violence is largely motivated by the evolved social relations models which underlie moral behavior in Fiske's theory, and that this violence is therefore experienced as justified by the perpetrators in the same way that forceful opposition to perpetrators of violence is perceived as laudable and moral. [7]

Publications

Related Research Articles

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In social psychology, an interpersonal relation describes a social association, connection, or affiliation between two or more persons. It overlaps significantly with the concept of social relations, which are the fundamental unit of analysis within the social sciences. Relations vary in degrees of intimacy, self-disclosure, duration, reciprocity, and power distribution. The main themes or trends of the interpersonal relations are: family, kinship, friendship, love, marriage, business, employment, clubs, neighborhoods, ethical values, support and solidarity. Interpersonal relations may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement, and form the basis of social groups and societies. They appear when people communicate or act with each other within specific social contexts, and they thrive on equitable and reciprocal compromises.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social cognition</span> Study of cognitive processes involved in social interactions

Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dehumanization</span> Behavior or process that undermines individuality of and in others

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theoretical psychology</span> Domain of psychology concerning theory and philosophy

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Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cultural psychology</span> How cultures reflect and shape their psychology

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald T. Campbell</span> American social scientist

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to interpersonal relationships.

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Susan Tufts Fiske 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.

Richard Allan Shweder is an American cultural anthropologist and a figure in cultural psychology. He is currently Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

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Shelley Elizabeth Taylor is an American psychologist. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of social psychology: social cognition and health psychology. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor.

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. It has been subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The theory proposes six foundations:

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Relational models theory (RMT) is a theory of interpersonal relationships, authored by anthropologist Alan Fiske and initially developed from his fieldwork in Burkina Faso. RMT proposes that all human interactions can be described in terms of just four "relational models", or elementary forms of human relations: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching and market pricing.

References

  1. Human Sociality, Alan Fiske
  2. "Donald W. Fiske". The University of Chicago News Office. The University of Chicago. April 10, 2003. Retrieved June 23, 2017.
  3. "Susan T. Fiske: Award for distinguished scientific contributions". American Psychologist. 65 (8): 695–706. 2010. doi:10.1037/a0020437. PMID   21058759.
  4. 1 2 3 Curriculum vitae, Alan Fiske, Social Sciences division of UCLA
  5. Faculty page for Alan Fiske, UCLA
  6. Fiske, Alan P. (1992). "The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations". Psychological Review. 99 (4): 689–723. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.99.4.689. PMID   1454904. S2CID   17809556.
  7. Fiske, Alan Page; Rai, Tage Shakti (2014). Virtuous violence: hurting and killing to create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316104668. ISBN   9781316104668.