Profile of Susan Fiske

Abstract

Social psychologist Susan Fiske, Eugene Higgins Professor, Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, investigates aspects of social cognition, such as how stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are encouraged or discouraged by relationships with others. Her analytical approach, which now often employs neuroscience as well as more traditional social science research methods, has resulted in theoretical contributions and other works that have influenced numerous psychology students and researchers over the past four decades. Fiske’s teachings additionally have gone far beyond the classroom. A 1989 United States Supreme Court landmark decision on sex bias, for example, cited her research on sex-based discrimination. In 1998, her research concerning biological and social drivers of prejudice was mentioned during testimony before former United States President Clinton’s Race Initiative Advisory Board. In 2013, Fiske was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in the field of psychology. Susan Fiske. Photo courtesy of Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School. 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 …