Susan Fiske

Susan Fiske

Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at the Princeton University Department of Psychology. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice.

Fiske received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and its centennial medal in 2004. Her four most well-known contributions to the field are the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, continuum model of impression formation, and the power-as-control theory. She is also known for the term cognitive miser, coined with her graduate advisor Shelley Taylor, referring to individuals' tendencies to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics.

She popularized the phrase "thinking is for doing" (paraphrased from William James, "My thinking is first and last and always for my doing").

Fiske is a past president of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Foundation for the Advancement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. She was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She has authored over 250 publications and has written several books, including her 2010 work Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology. Social Cognition, a graduate level text that defined the now-popular subfield of social cognition. She also edits 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). Her most recent book is "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.

Fiske was the first social psychologist to testify in gender discrimination cases, including the landmark Hopkins v Price Waterhouse, ultimately heard by the Supreme Court. This led to continuing interest in the use of psychological science in legal contexts.

She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the Association for Psychological Science William James Fellow Award, and Princeton University Graduate School Mentoring Award. She was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Leiden in 2009 and the Université catholique de Louvain in 1995.

Fiske grew up in Hyde Park, Chicago. She is married to sociologist Douglas Massey.