Family of Scientists and Civil Rights Activists

Born in 1952, Fiske grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park in a racially integrated community. Her father, Donald Fiske, was an accomplished psychology professor at the University of Chicago. Her mother, Barbara Page Fiske, was a full-time civic volunteer and editor. Her economist grandmother and her great grandmother were both suffragists who fought for women’s rights. Fiske credits her brother, Alan Page Fiske, now an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, as being another important role model. “Dinner table conversations were stimulating,” Fiske says.

In 1973, Fiske enrolled in Radcliffe College for her undergraduate degree in social relations at Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude. A passion for both civic activism and scientific learning helped fuel her efforts. “The nature of the times and my mother’s legacy made me feel obligated to try to make the world a better place,” Fiske says. “My parents’ standards—and especially my father’s empirical and measurement standards—made me realize that the only principled way to offer policy insights is to make them evidence-based. For that, one needs scientific skills and credentials.”

Combining Social and Cognitive Psychology

Fiske continued her studies at Harvard, where she received her doctorate in 1978. Fiske’s primary advisor, Harvard assistant professor Shelley Taylor, was an early mentor. “She taught me that the career could be both scholarly and entertaining,” Fiske says. Although Fiske became an assistant professor of psychology and social science at Carnegie-Mellon University upon receiving her doctorate, she and Taylor continued to work together studying social cognition, and particularly the effect attention has in social situations. Some researchers thought that the fields of social psychology and cognitive psychology should be kept separate, but Taylor and Fiske believed otherwise. In 1984, they coauthored the seminal book Social Cognition (1). Fiske says, “The volume surveys the intersection of social and cognitive psychology, showing how people make sense of other people and themselves.” The book has been cited more than 10,572 times and, through its subsequent revisions, continues to track developing theories and concepts.

Fiske’s methods advisors at Harvard, Robert Rosenthal and David Kenny, also served as mentors. “They both taught me that statistics and experimental design are tools, not cookbooks,” she says. Fiske adds, “My social-issues research mentor was Tom Pettigrew, who taught me that rigorous social-scientific methods can yield real-world benefits.”

Continuum Model of Impression Formation

Fiske went on to teach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, actively conducting research. In 1990, she and her student Steven Neuberg developed one of the first dual-process models of social cognition, known as the “continuum model.” (2) In psychology, dual process refers to how a phenomenon can occur in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes, such as automatically or deliberately. Fiske says that for the continuum model, “The theory and evidence explain how people form impressions of other people along a continuum, from categorical and stereotypical to fully individuated judgments. This process depends on information available and people’s motivation to process it.”

Power-As-Control Theory

In 1993, Fiske formulated a theory that explains how social power motivates people to heed or ignore others (3). The theory, later supported by data, holds that powerless individuals attend to the powerful who control their outcomes, in an effort to enhance prediction and control. As a result, the powerless are more likely to form complex, nonstereotypic impressions. Conversely, powerful individuals pay less attention, and are more vulnerable to stereotyping as a result. Fiske says, “Stereotyping and power are mutually reinforcing because stereotyping itself exerts control, maintaining and justifying the status quo.”

Ambivalent Sexism Theory

Three years later, Fiske and psychologist Peter Glick developed the ambivalent sexism theory (4) as a way to understand the complexities of prejudice against women. “The theory, scale, and data show that sexism is not just hostile, seeing nontraditional women as a competitive threat, but also subjectively ‘benevolent,’” Fiske says. She explains that this benevolence is tied to the idealization and protection of women. People who endorse benevolent sexism feel positively about women, but usually only when women conform to traditional ideals.

Just as stereotyping and power are mutually enforcing, according to Fiske, so too are hostile and benevolent sexism. The beliefs work together because benevolent sexism rewards women when they fulfill traditional roles, whereas hostile sexism punishes women who do not fit such ideals. Fiske’s earlier work, leading to this theory, contributed to her testimony in the landmark Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse case, which was eventually heard by the United States Supreme Court in 1989. The effort led to her continuing interest in the use of psychological science in legal contexts.

Stereotype Content Model

In 2000 Fiske accepted a position as professor of psychology at Princeton University, where she remains today, now holding the title of Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Her husband, Douglas Massey, is a professor of sociology at Princeton. He was elected as a member to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998.

In 2002 Fiske, in collaboration with Glick and former student Amy Cuddy, developed the stereotype content model (5). Its theory and data show that people locate groups along two primary dimensions: warmth and competence. “Warmth” in this case refers to the individuals’ trustworthiness and friendliness. The stereotype content model explains that warmth and competence differentiate out-group stereotypes, such that the traits are the first by which an individual is automatically evaluated by another. The model was originally formulated to understand the social classification of groups within the United States. It has since been applied to the analysis of social classes and structures across different countries and historical periods (6).

Advances in Social Cognitive Neuroscience

Fiske is a leader in the field of social cognitive neuroscience, which examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as how individuals perceive others. In 2006, Fiske and former student Lasana Harris used brain imaging to demonstrate that prejudice can occur at basic neural levels (7). The study provides evidence that although individuals may consciously see members of social out-groups as people, the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain may process some out-groups as something less than human.

In 2011 Fiske explored the phenomenon of “dehumanized perception,” or failing to consider someone else’s mind and thereby not exhibiting empathy (8). MRI scans of study participants, Ivy League students representing different ethnicities, found that their neural networks involved in social interaction failed to respond to images of drug addicts, the homeless, immigrants, and poor people. This failure in the part of the brain that is critical for social interaction could help to explain why even well-intentioned people sometimes disregard or hurt others. Fiske says, “We need to think about other people’s experience. It’s what makes them fully human to us.” In recognition of this and other research, Fiske received the William James Fellow Award, Association for Psychological Science (2008–2009); the Guggenheim Fellowship (2009–2010); and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (2010); and she was honored as a Corresponding Fellow, British Academy (2011).

Revealing the Power of Perceived Intent

Fiske’s Inaugural Article (9) builds upon prior research, which found that people overestimate damage caused by intentional harms relative to those thought to be unintentional. In a paper (10) published last year, Fiske and coauthor Daniel Ames applied the finding to current political events and national policies, writing, “Policymakers sometimes over-allocate resources to harms that feel highly intentional—like preventing murders and terrorist attacks—even when data suggest that humanitarian interests might be better served by dedicating some of those resources to other causes, like global warming and malnutrition.”

The article (9) presents the conclusions of three studies, suggesting why the overestimation occurs. The first study shows that the harm-magnification effect emerges specifically for human intentional action, but not for human unintentional action. The second study asks whether intended harm motivates blame or merely demonstrates the actor’s intrinsic blameworthiness. Consistent with a motivational interpretation, participants freely chose blaming, condemning, and punishing over other appealing tasks in an intentional harm condition, compared with a control condition. The third study also measures motivation, but with converging indicators of persistence (effort, rate, and duration) in blaming. Fiske says, “Together, these studies argue that intentional harms seem worse, even when they are not. Perceived intent catalyzes a motivated social cognitive process related to social prediction and control.”

In 2014 Fiske was elected president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. She also was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. Fiske and her team continue to investigate perceived intent. As Fiske says, “We make sense of each other by inferring people’s intent for good or ill. This determines who is friend or foe, whom we blame and how much, and how we try to manage other people’s impressions of us in return. In the future, I want to explore people as containing multitudes, possessing many cultures and categories.”