Professor Susan T. Fiske

Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Department of Psychology

Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs, at Princeton University (Harvard University PhD; honorary doctorates: Université catholique de Louvain-la-neuve, Universiteit Leiden, Universität Basel, Universidad de Granada). She investigates social cognition, how people make sense of each other. With Taylor, she wrote several editions of a field-founding graduate text, Social Cognition, which won the 2020 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Science Award for Social Science.

Fiske especially focuses on cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices, at cultural, interpersonal, and neuro-scientific levels. Primarily, she is known for the Stereotype Content Model, which identifies two core dimensions of group’ images: being warm/trustworthy or not, and being competent or not (e.g., Old people are stereotyped as warm but incompetent). Sponsored by a Guggenheim and a Russell-Sage-Foundation grant, Fiske’s Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us analyzes common and distinctive experiences of stratification by class, race, ethnicity, age, and gender.

She has edited volumes on social cognition, nuclear war, racism, sexism, classism, social neuroscience, psychology in court, research ethics, and science making a difference. She currently edits for Annual Review of Psychology, PNAS, and Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Author of about 400 publications and winner of numerous scientific awards, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; she chaired its Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences, which spearheaded NASEM initiatives on DEI.