Alan Fiske | |
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Born | Alan Page Fiske 1947 (age 76–77) |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Harvard University (BA) University of Chicago (MA, PhD) |
Known for | Social 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]
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]
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]
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.
Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development.
Dehumanization is the denial of full humanity in others along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. A practical definition refers to it as the viewing and the treatment of other people as though they lack the mental capacities that are commonly attributed to human beings. In this definition, every act or thought that regards a person as "less than" human is dehumanization.
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.
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.
Donald Thomas Campbell was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term evolutionary epistemology and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Campbell as the 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to interpersonal relationships.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Jean Decety is an American–French neuroscientist specializing in developmental neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and social neuroscience. His research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underpinning social cognition, particularly social decision-making, empathy, moral reasoning, altruism, pro-social behavior, and more generally interpersonal relationships. He is Irving B. Harris Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
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.
Social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group.
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.
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.
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. More recently, Mohammad Atari, Jesse Graham, and Jonathan Haidt have revised some aspects of the theory and developed new measurement tools. The theory has been developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The theory proposes that morality is "more than one thing", first arguing for five foundations, and later expanding for six foundations :
The psychology of eating meat is an area of study seeking to illuminate the confluence of morality, emotions, cognition, and personality characteristics in the phenomenon of the consumption of meat. Research into the psychological and cultural factors of meat-eating suggests correlations with masculinity, support for hierarchical values, and reduced openness to experience. Because meat eating is widely practiced but is sometimes associated with ambivalence, it has been used as a case study in moral psychology to illustrate theories of cognitive dissonance and moral disengagement. Research into the consumer psychology of meat is relevant to meat industry marketing, as well as for advocates of reduced meat consumption.
A functional account of emotions posits that emotions facilitate adaptive responses to environmental challenges. In other words, emotions are systems that respond to environmental input, such as a social or physical challenge, and produce adaptive output, such as a particular behavior. Under such accounts, emotions can manifest in maladaptive feelings and behaviors, but they are largely beneficial insofar as they inform and prepare individuals to respond to environmental challenges, and play a crucial role in structuring social interactions and relationships.
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.