Susan Fiske

The stereotype content model (SCM) is a psychological theory arguing that people tend to perceive social groups along two fundamental dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth describes the group’s perceived intent (friendly and trustworthy or not); competence describes their perceived ability to act on their intent. 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 and history.

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). Nations with higher income inequality tend to use these mixed stereotypes more frequently.

Groups’ perceived cooperativeness predicts their perceived warmth, and this dimension reflects the importance of intent. Warmth predicts active helping and harming. A group's perceived status predicts its stereotypic competence, so this reflects a belief in meritocracy, that people get what they deserve. Competence predicts passive helping and harming.

After the leak of her letter, she tempered the language in the published APS Observer column, removing the term "methodological terrorists". 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.” Since writing the column, Fiske has published peer-reviewed advice about publishing rigorous research in the 21st century and about adversarial collaboration as a remedy to public incivility among disagreeing perspectives.

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).

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. In 2010, she was awarded the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. 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. 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.

Fiske was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Basel in 2013, the University of Leiden in 2009 and the Université catholique de Louvain in 1995.

She has authored over 300 publications and has written several books, including her 2010 work Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology 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, and The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies.

Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is 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.

Fiske comes from a family of psychologists and civil activists. Her father, Donald W. Fiske, was an influential psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. Her mother, Barbara Page Fiske (1917-2007), was a civic leader in Chicago. Her brother, Alan Page Fiske, is an anthropologist at UCLA. Fiske's grandmother and great grandmother were suffragettes. In 1973, Susan Fiske enrolled at Radcliffe College for her undergraduate degree in social relations at Harvard University where she graduated magna cum laude. 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 Princeton, New Jersey with her husband Douglas Massey, a Princeton sociologist.