Susan Fiske | |
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Born | August 19, 1952 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Radcliffe College (BA) Harvard University (PhD) |
Occupation(s) | Professor of psychology at Princeton University, author |
Known for | Stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, cognitive miser |
Relatives | Donald Fiske (father), Alan Fiske (brother) |
Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is an American psychologist who served as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. [1] She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. [2] 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. [3] Her mother, Barbara Page Fiske (1917–2007), was a civic leader in Chicago. [4] Her brother, Alan Page Fiske, is an anthropologist at UCLA. Fiske's grandmother and great grandmother were suffragists. [5] Two nieces and her daughter all have psychology PhDs. In 1969, Susan Fiske enrolled at Radcliffe College for her undergraduate degree in social relations, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1973. [1] 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 Vermont, with her husband Douglas Massey, a retired Princeton sociologist. [5]
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. [5] 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. [5] Fiske and Steven Neuberg went on to develop one of the first dual process models 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, [6] 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. [7]
Working with Peter Glick, Fiske analyzed the interdependence 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. [8]
Fiske worked with Peter Glick and Amy Cuddy to develop the Stereotype Content Model. [5] This model explains that warmth and competence differentiate out group stereotypes.
Fiske has been involved in the field of social cognitive neuroscience. [5] This field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception. [9] Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping, [10] intergroup hostility, [11] and impression formation. [12]
She has authored over 400 publications and has written several books, including her 2010 work Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology [13] 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, [14] and The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies. [15] She serves on the Board of Directors of Annual Reviews. [16]
Her four most well-known contributions to the field of psychology are the stereotype content model, [17] [18] ambivalent sexism theory, [19] the continuum model of impression formation, [20] and the power-as-control theory. [21] 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. [22] [23]
The stereotype content model (SCM) is a psychological theory arguing that people tend to perceive social groups along two fundamental dimensions: warmth and competence. [18] [24] Warmth describes the group's perceived intent (friendly and trustworthy or not); competence describes their perceived ability to act on their intent. [24] 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 [10] [25] and history. [26]
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). [27] Nations with higher income inequality tend to use these mixed stereotypes more frequently. [25]
Groups’ perceived cooperativeness predicts their perceived warmth, and this dimension reflects the importance of intent. [18] Warmth predicts active helping and harming. [28] A group's perceived status predicts its stereotypic competence, so this reflects a belief in meritocracy, that people get what they deserve. [18] Competence predicts passive helping and harming. [28]
Fiske and Peter Glick developed the ambivalent sexism inventory (ASI) as a way of understanding prejudice against women. [19] The ASI posits two sub-components of gender stereotyping: hostile sexism (hostility towards nontraditional women), and benevolent sexism (idealizing and protecting traditional women). The theory posits that men and women's intimate interdependence, coupled with men's average status advantage, requires incentives for women who cooperate (benevolent sexism) and punishment for women who resist (hostile sexism). [29] Both men and women can endorse hostile sexism and benevolent sexism, though men on average score higher than women, especially on hostile sexism. [30] The ASI appears useful across nations. [31] The authors have also developed a parallel scale of ambivalence toward men. [32]
Power-as-control theory aims to explain how social power motivates people to heed or ignore others. In this framework, power is defined as control over valued resources and over others' outcomes. Low-power individuals attend to those who control resources, while powerful people need not attend to low-power individuals (since high-power individuals can, by definition, get what they want). [33]
This model describes the process by which we form impressions of others. Impression formation is framed as depending on two factors: The available information and the perceiver's motivations. [34] According to the model, these two factors help to explain people's tendency to apply stereotyping processes vs. individuating processes when forming social impressions.
With the replication crisis of psychology earning attention, Fiske drew controversy for calling out critics of psychology. [35] [36] [37] [38] In a letter intended for publication in APS Observer, she referred to these unnamed "adversaries" as "methodological terrorist" and "self-appointed data police", and said that criticism of psychology should only be expressed in private or through contacting the journals. [35] Columbia University statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman, "well-respected among the researchers driving the replication debate", responded to Fiske, saying that she had found herself willing to tolerate the "dead paradigm" of faulty statistics and had refused to retract publications even when errors were pointed out. [35] [39] He added that during her tenure as editor a number of papers edited by her were found to be based on extremely weak statistics; one of Fiske's own published papers had a major statistical error and "impossible" conclusions. [35]
After the leak of her letter, she tempered the language in the published APS Observer column, removing the term "methodological terrorists". [40] In the column, she expressed concern that although peer critiques are valuable, peer critique through social media outlets "can encourage a certain amount of uncurated, unfiltered denigration." She elaborated: "In a few rare but chilling cases, self-appointed data police are volunteering critiques" that "attack the person, not just the work; they attack publicly, without quality controls; they have reportedly sent their unsolicited, unvetted attacks to tenure-review committees and public-speaking sponsors; they have implicated targets' family members and advisors." [37] Since writing the column, Fiske has published peer-reviewed advice about publishing rigorous research in the 21st century [41] and about adversarial collaboration as a remedy to public incivility among disagreeing perspectives. [42]
Fiske became an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. In 2011, Fiske was elected into the Fellowship of the British Academy. [1] In 2010, she was awarded the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. [1] She received numerous awards in 2009, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Association for Psychological Science William James Fellow Award, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Donald Campbell Award. [1] [43] [44] In 2008, Fiske received the Staats Award for Unifying Psychology, from the American Psychological Association. In 2003, she was awarded the Thomas Ostrom Award from the International Social Cognition Network and for 2019 the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences. [45]
Fiske was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Granada in 2017, University of Basel in 2013, the University of Leiden in 2009 and the Université catholique de Louvain in 1995. [1]
She served as past president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Division 8 of the American Psychological Association, the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the Foundation for the Advancement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the American Psychological Society (now the Association for Psychological Science). She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014. [46]
A quantitative analysis published in 2014 identified Fiske as the 22nd most eminent researcher in the modern era of psychology (12th among living researchers, 2nd among women). [47]
Positive illusions are unrealistically favorable attitudes that people have towards themselves or to people that are close to them. Positive illusions are a form of self-deception or self-enhancement that feel good; maintain self-esteem; or avoid discomfort, at least in the short term. There are three general forms: inflated assessment of one's own abilities, unrealistic optimism about the future, and an illusion of control. The term "positive illusions" originates in a 1988 paper by Taylor and Brown. "Taylor and Brown's (1988) model of mental health maintains that certain positive illusions are highly prevalent in normal thought and predictive of criteria traditionally associated with mental health."
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.
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.
Laurie A. Rudman is a social psychology feminist professor as well as the Director of the Rutgers University Social Cognition Laboratory who has contributed a great deal of research to studies on implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes, stereotype maintenance processes, and the media's effects on attitudes, stereotypes, and behavior on the Feminism movement. She was awarded the 1994 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize for her research examining the effects of sexist advertising on men's behavior toward female job applicants.
In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group's personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes are often overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information. A stereotype does not necessarily need to be a negative assumption. They may be positive, neutral, or negative.
Ambivalent sexism is a theoretical framework which posits that sexism has two sub-components: hostile sexism (HS) and benevolent sexism (BS). Hostile sexism reflects overtly negative evaluations and stereotypes about a gender. Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive, but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly. For the most part, psychologists have studied hostile forms of sexism. However, theorists using the theoretical framework of ambivalent sexism have found extensive empirical evidence for both varieties. The theory has largely been developed by social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske.
Ambivalent prejudice is a social psychological theory that states that, when people become aware that they have conflicting beliefs about an outgroup, they experience an unpleasant mental feeling generally referred to as cognitive dissonance. These feelings are brought about because the individual on one hand believes in humanitarian virtues such as helping those in need, but on the other hand also believes in individualistic virtues such as working hard to improve one's life.
Benevolent prejudice is a superficially positive prejudice expressed in terms of positive beliefs and emotional responses, which are associated with hostile prejudices or result in keeping affected groups in inferior societal positions. Benevolent prejudice can be expressed towards those of different race, religion, ideology, country, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
The women-are-wonderful effect is the phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with women when compared to men. This bias reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic in 1994 after finding that both male and female participants tend to assign positive traits to women, with female participants showing a far more pronounced bias. Positive traits were assigned to men by participants of both genders, but to a far lesser degree.
Hostile prejudice is the outward expression of hate for people of a different race, religion, ideology, country, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Anyone who goes against specific criteria of dress, cultural or moral beliefs, or religious or political ideologies are subject to hostile racism. This racism often leads to direct discrimination to anyone who does not fit the prejudiced person's idea of a "normal" person. This behavior is most prevalent when there are noticeable differences between ingroups and outgroups, with the outgroup members experiencing hostile prejudice from ingroup members.
In social psychology, the stereotype content model (SCM) is a model, first proposed in 2002, postulating that all group stereotypes and interpersonal impressions form along two dimensions: (1) warmth and (2) competence.
In personality psychology, the lexical hypothesis generally includes two postulates:
1. Those personality characteristics that are important to a group of people will eventually become a part of that group's language.
Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She is a proponent of "power posing", a self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. Cuddy's most cited academic work involves using the stereotype content model that she helped develop to better understand the way people think about stereotyped people and groups. Though Cuddy left her tenure-track position at Harvard Business School in the spring of 2017, she continues to contribute to its executive education programs.
Everett Lowell Kelly was an American clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, president of the American Psychological Association (1954–55), and chairman of the Executive Committee for the Boulder Conference on Graduate Training in Clinical Psychology (1948–49).
In social psychology, a positive stereotype refers to a subjectively favourable belief held about a social group. Common examples of positive stereotypes are Asians with better math ability, African Americans with greater athletic ability, and women with being warmer and more communal. As opposed to negative stereotypes, positive stereotypes represent a "positive" evaluation of a group that typically signals an advantage over another group. As such, positive stereotypes may be considered a form of compliment or praise. However, positive stereotypes can have a positive or negative effect on targets of positive stereotypes. The positive or negative influence of positive stereotypes on targets depends on three factors: (1) how the positive stereotype is stated, (2) who is stating the positive stereotype, (3) in what culture the positive stereotype is presented.
Sandra L. Murray is Professor of Psychology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is a social psychologist known for her work on close relationships and their trajectories over time. Murray received the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology in 2003 for "distinguished and original contributions to an understanding of motivated social cognition in relationships." Other awards include the New Contribution Award from the International Society for the Study of Personal Relationships in 1998 and 2000, the Outstanding Early Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity in 2000, the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2012, the Mid-Career Distinguished Contribution Award from the International Association for Relationship Research in 2016, and the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2020.
Intergroup relations refers to interactions between individuals in different social groups, and to interactions taking place between the groups themselves collectively. It has long been a subject of research in social psychology, political psychology, and organizational behavior.
Monica R. Biernat is a social psychologist known for her research on social judgment, stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas.
Felicia Pratto is a social psychologist known for her work on intergroup relations, dynamics of power, and social cognition. She is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Pratto is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Peter Samuel Glick is an American social psychologist and the Henry Merritt Wriston Professor in the Social Sciences at Lawrence University. He is known for his research on gender stereotyping and ambivalent sexism. In 2022, Glick, Amy Cuddy, and Susan Fiske were honored with the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Scientific Impact Award for their 2002 paper proposing the stereotype content model.