Fiske, Susan

Susan T. Fiske is known for her pioneering work in social cognition, the study of how people perceive others. Fiske has emphasized the importance of social motives in shaping social cognition and the importance of power in shaping social motives. Fiske and her collaborators have theorized and demonstrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and stereotyping.

Fiske defines power as relative control over another person's outcomes. One of her first experiments showed a link between power and attention: paying more attention to a person in a social situation led to seeing that person as having more power in that situation. Later, Fiske and colleagues proposed and showed that the need to predict and control one's outcomes leads people to pay more attention to those who control their outcomes than to those who do not. This, in turn, leads people to base their impressions of powerful others on their actual attributes but to rely on stereotypes to form impressions of those less powerful. In an influential article published in 1993, Fiske outlines a theory of the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and stereotyping. Fiske proposes that social attention mediates power and stereotyping by leading people to pay more attention to the powerful than to the powerless and therefore to individuate the powerful while stereotyping the powerless. This process reinforces stereotypes about the powerless and perpetuates their subordination because stereotypes are created to explain and justify the status quo. This theory ignited interest in the cognitive and other effects of power in social psychology and was followed by an explosion in theory and research on social power in the discipline.

Fiske has also studied how the content of stereotypes relates to power. Fiske and collaborators propose that stereotypes are usually ambivalent, or contain both positive and negative attributes, because social groups are usually interdependent: one group may depend more on another, but each group usually controls the other's outcomes to some extent. Fiske and her colleagues developed a theory and measures of ambivalent sexism, have studied ambivalent ageism, and developed the stereotype content model. This model proposes that all social groups are stereotyped along the dimensions of competence and warmth, and that status predicts perceptions of competence (with high status groups seen as more competent than low status groups) and the nature of interdependence predicts perceptions of warmth (with cooperative interdependence leading to perceptions of warmth and competitive interdependence leading to perceptions of coldness). Experiments by Fiske and her colleagues using functional magnetic resonance imaging show that the medial prefrontal cortex, necessary for social cognition, is not activated when people view images of individuals from groups stereotyped as very low in competence and in warmth. This suggests that the brain pays no attention to these individuals and reacts to them as though they are inanimate objects instead of humans.

Fiske's research has been instrumental to understanding real-world social problems, such as sex and race discrimination, sexual harassment, reactions to the threat of nuclear war, anti-American sentiment, and the torture of enemy prisoners.