Featured Member

Susan T. Fiske

Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University (Ph.D., Harvard University; honorary doctorates, Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands). She has just finished a third edition of Social Cognition (1984, 1991, 2008, each with Taylor) on how people make sense of each other. She has written more than 200 articles and chapters, as well as editing many books and journal special issues. Notably, she edits the Annual Review of Psychology (with Schacter and Sternberg) and the Handbook of Social Psychology (with Gilbert and Lindzey). She also wrote an upper-level integrative text, Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology (2004, 2010) and edited Beyond Common Sense: Psychological Science in the Courtroom (2008, with Borgida).

Currently, she investigates emotional prejudices (pity, contempt, envy, and pride) at cultural, interpersonal, and neural levels, research currently funded by the Russell Sage Foundation (2008-2010) and previously funded by the National Science Foundation (1984-1986, 1995-1997) and the National Institutes of Health (1986-1995). Her expert testimony in discrimination cases was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1989 landmark decision on gender bias. In 1998, she also testified before President Clinton’s Race Initiative Advisory Board, and in 2001-03, she co-authored a National Academy of Science report on Methods for Measuring Discrimination. In 2004, she published a Science article explaining how ordinary people can torture enemy prisoners, through processes of prejudice and social influence.

Most recently, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Russell Sage Scholar Award, and Association for Psychological Science William James Fellow Award. Previously, she won the American Psychological Association Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest for anti-discrimination testimony and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’ Allport Intergroup Relations Award for ambivalent sexism theory (with Glick), as well as Harvard’s Graduate Centennial Medal. She was elected President of the Association for Psychological Science, President of the Foundation for the Advancement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her graduate students recently arranged for her to win Princeton’s 2009 Graduate Mentor Award, showing how lucky she is in her lab members.

Her expert witness work has familiarized her with workplace discrimination in settings from shipyards and assembly lines to international investment firms, and she has served on diversity committees in several nonprofit settings, including Princeton’s Carl A. Fields Center. She grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park, a stable, racially integrated community, and she still wonders why the rest of the world does not work that way.

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